Here's who really has the power at Reddit

Reddit went into revolt over the weekend after the company apparently dismissed a popular employee, Victoria Taylor, who was in charge of the site's popular "Ask Me Anything" interviews. Volunteers who run the site's communities, or subreddits, shut hundreds of them down in protest.

How important are those subreddits? They're basically the site.

This chart from Statista, based on metrics shared by Reddit, shows the nearly 7x explosion in subreddits since 2012 - from about 100,000 to more than 660,000 now. During that same period, traffic to the site nearly doubled, from 37 billion pageviews in 2012 to 71 billion in 2014.

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If those subreddits go away permanently, so will the readers.

Reddit via Statista