It's a paradigm that defeats itself. Reddit is basically reselling access to shit that users freely submit. They start removing access from users who don't want to pay or use the official (bad experience) app, and they will necessarily have fewer submissions and less content.

If its a hassle to go there and use it, and the payment structure disincentivizes their young demographic from using it, it is no longer the "cool kid" corner of the internet, which further removes the reason why other people would want to pay for it.

Imagine I'm a hypothetical Reddit user under the new model - what would be my incentive to pay them for the privilege of posting links, quality text posts, my girlfriends tits, or anything else for that matter?