I'm seriously thinking I should ask for donations for LangPop.com - people like it but don't click on the ads. Maybe I could have a donate-o-meter for different languages.
I have no interest in paying for reddit on a regular basis and cannot imagine any feature or service they could add that would make me change my mind. A donation to give the reddit team an opportunity to get their heads above water and start making positive progress was what I signed up for.
The last 6 months to a year, reddit has had regular scaling/feature/etc. problems and the communication from the admins and devs has always had the same tone of overwhelm. I'd love to see a site I use so often and enjoy so much get out of that hole and though I don't see this as being the way I wish them the best of luck.
(A bit off-topic but EC2 sticks out as the big money sink they need to fix, the last number I remember them quoting was $200,000 a year for their EC2/S3 usage. I would have loved to hear the money was going to outfitting a few racks and moving things back out of the cloud.)
In other words, you and the other donors lost a game of chicken with Conde Naste, and are paying for something that they now do not have to.
I suppose it's possible that they really would have shut things down or just let the site rot, but it seems a bit odd. Hard to know without more information though.