Like every other industry, there's a growth period where things are new and prices are reasonable, and then there's the "squeeze" where bean counters come in, make charts that are likely bs, and explain how much easier it'd be if we charged 4x as much for half the customer base.
Twitter was one of the first to give access to cheap mass data, and now they're one of the first to charge through the nose for that. The move is going to be that if you're not enterprise level you're not getting this data anymore, and I doubt it stops with reddit.
I think especially in a forum where people tend to be semi anon. This isn't staking out a facebook name and keeping up with highschool friends. I know a few user names by sight on reddit but I really don't care if I hear from them again and I don't expect they care about me.
Makes leaving to anywhere that can put together a decent UGC interface pretty simple. It just feels like other than content, which reddit doesn't actually post, there's not much in the way of network affect.