Yes, turns out that insulting your customers when they complain because you took away all the good stuff in order to incentivise spending money via your very bad alternatives will piss off even the last few masochistic users still remaining on reddit, so you have to eat some crow and try to somehow monetize the last thing you took away instead.
(It’s worth noting that although there were understandable concerns about the Contributor Program leading to karma farming or other spam and fraud issues, we haven’t seen an increase in this behavior since the rollout six months ago.)
Rewards are coming "We messed up – sorry" (www.reddit.com)