CleoTheWizard

I’ll be real with you, both of those things are huge for a company as large as reddit. They will obsess over user features that increase attention by just one or two percent. So losing that much traffic is a red alert.

They also will have tracking for number of posts and comments deleted, number of subscriptions lost, users banned, etc. All of those numbers will look awful.

In fact, karma is a really good indicator of what they lose. If you take karma, divide by time since account creation, then you have an excellent measure of engagement with communities. They can see how much karma is being lost. That’s why they’re afraid.