The company wants to grow and become more profitable, the community wants to preserve what it has.
I don't know if a site like this can really be run as a for profit company, at least not a growth oriented one. The obvious monetization schemes will be met with resistance. Even though its attracted a lot of users, can it really ever make money?
And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that?
By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are now unwanted they try to get once again a somewhat homogeneous (albeit different) group of people. So maybe soon they are structurally exactly where they were some years ago except for the huge lost of trust of their users.
How is this going to help increasing their profit?
The possibilities should be endless. One thing I could have imagined would be cooperations with companies that have products which reddit user value and use heavily. Take Valve's Steam, for instance. Reddit could have offered those companies a service to buy a sub that is especially tailored for the company's needs so that they could turn their sub into a tailor-made r&d lab (with special features as required...). Those who love their products would be thrilled to develop ideas and share their user knowledge with their favorite company.
As long as they would've selected companies carefully and resist from interfering with other parts of reddit no one would run away. If anything, those "special sub" could be a gateway drug for new users.