In a nutshell:
Imagine if you own a nice Jaguar - keep it in your garage and let the neighbours borrow it to go to the shops. Now you need to do some maintenance, and make up for losses in your taxi service (which might cost $2 per km) so you wanna price this as a premium service. … so you could charge them $5 takeout fee plus $1 per km, or (if you’re greedy) just go for $5 per km.
What Reddit did is say ‘Fuck you, you want to use it, you pay $100 per km or fuck off - we don’t care’.
The amount of money Reddit makes for you getting advertisements is actually less than $1 per km… The same occurs with YouTube. If you actually click to donate, then you can pay enough to cover thousands of hours of advertisements in one small swipe.
What we need is MICROpayments spread across a wider user-base to balance the ad-supported platform, and then people will accept that small payments are better.
The problem is that Premium screws you too - you have issues using downloaded content if you’re not connected WTF.