This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don't care that the specific group that's leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don't care that it's lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don't care what percent of their "high quality" traffic disappears for it.

Since they're bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There's never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It's win/win/win for them.