There's a sucker born every minute.
When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned.
10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by building games like Starcraft II, or they could build for the current wave, and build games like Candy Crush.
Gamers who prefer games like Starcraft want to pay once for a game that lasts years and expect perfection. Candy Crush, like the Pokemon cards before it, expected nothing and were willing to spend a bunch of money for ultimately nothing. The business should clearly move to making Candy Crushes. The ROI is insane.
But the more you bleed the users, the more they get fleeced, the more they start to learn, the more they regret. Yesterday's Pokemon cards buyers were todays Starcraft gamers, and today's Candy Crush players are tomorrows expert gamers. You want to build your platform to grow with them. Build a Candy Crush, then build it slightly more complex. In 10 years, they will be ready for Starcraft.
You can continue to seek the bottom of the skill zone, but we had that one wave where adults of all ages were getting new phones and experiencing things that they had never done before. We had that one time where kids were able to ask their parents and their parents were not skilled and did not regret so they did not say no. Using a peak oil metaphor, we've reach peak sucker. We'll never have this opportunity again.
So cutting back to Reddit - Reddit, like Digg and Slashdot and Usenet before it, released to the Starcraft level of the social commentors. They are hard to deal with, they expect everything for nothing, but the quality of their content brought along with it the slightly less expert commentators. Eventually that filtered down and the entire internet was on Reddit. The entire internet was incredible for their ROI.
Digg was ruined because they abandoned the Starcraft commentors. When they left, everyone left with them. Reddit has been smart in this regard, as the old features and the old API still exists, the power users can use power user tools and keep the same experience. But understand, that if given the opportunity to move elsewhere, even somewhere that has less features like say... Hacker News, they will do so. They have done so. If Reddit keeps chasing the bottom of the market, when someone does show up with actual innovations like what Reddit had over Digg, you need to be afraid because just like Digg the site will be dead over-night.
When you should be looking at bringing those casual users into moderate users, you keep trying the dark patterns. But each time you go back to the dark patterns they get weaker and weaker. That strong dark pattern that used to get you millions of dollars now only get you hundreds of thousands. Next week it will be tens of thousands. Your users are developing dark pattern tolerance. You don't yet have a valid competitor, this is exactly when you should be experimenting to disrupt yourself.