This sounds about right to me. One of the points in the article that was really enlightening to me was the trade-off between lower-risk, subsistance production

This sounds about right to me. One of the points in the article that was really enlightening to me was the trade-off between lower-risk, subsistance production and higher-risk, but much higher reward excess production. Smaller and more insular communities tend to value the subsistance level production as they don't need to over-produce in order fulfill their community's needs. So, a reddit that is dominated by lots of niche communities that don't want to produce excess value that can be collected in 'rent' or 'taxes', really undermines the big dreams of the VC's that have funded reddit for so long.