But what Reddit is putting a price on is access to content generated by its users, not Reddit itself.

Spot on. Spez is short-sighted thinking he can “musk out” of this situation, as reddit is no twitter.

Twitter’s value is on its users: often empty but famous shells moving hot air from tweet to tweet. Reddit’s value was in the content we brought but as soon as we stop feeding the beast it’s just a glorified wayback machine. That is, if we do not delete our past contributions.