I used to love Reddit. I used to love FB. I used to love Twitter. But over time decisions were made which made my experience of those sites became increasingly less enjoyable and negative until I found myself rarely using them at all.
In the short-term I tolerated a lot of crap, but in the long-term I didn't. And it wasn't even an explicit decision, it was a slow emotional change in how I perceived those sites.
I'm sure the team behind this decision will be praised for increasing monthly active accounts by 5% and ad revenue by 0.5%. But what won't be measured by KPIs is the slow trend of people who just decide to spend their time elsewhere because Reddit isn't as enjoyable anymore.
I have no experience with what it takes to run a company like Reddit, but if I were in charge of Reddit today a/b tests and performance metrics would be banned in favour of humans empathising with humans. I completely understand the incentive to optimise for KPIs over users in the near-term and I do accept that sometimes there are times where user satisfaction can't be the first priority, but this is why human insight is so important. Any human with experience of the Reddit userbase would know it's a mistake to force users to login to view NSFW content, even if that's what the data suggests is the right thing to do.