I seem to recall a few years ago Reddit released some statistics that said the vast majority of their visitors (I think it was something like 70%) have no accounts and never participate in the reddit community.
Furthermore a huge portion of their users with accounts only upvoted/downvoted, rarely commented and almost never posted content/links.
So sitting in Reddits HQ I can see why they'd be willing to brush the heavy users aside in favour of eyeballs & commercial interest. Not that it would be a smart thing to do as the heavy users are really the life blood of reddit.
But as we've seen before with digg, flickr, myspace:
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