Yeah, I think they gotta do more than that though. Go straight up like Jimmy Wales and just say we need X dollars, if you want reddit to stay up. Maybe give reddit gold as a bonus to everyone who donates.
The biggest problem with Reddit Gold is it seems like a feature you can live without (especially if you use reddit enhancement suite). They don't emphasize enough that it's a donation to keep the site going.
Wikipedia is shady at best about how much money they actually need from the community. Reddit does not internet to receive people into giving up money. The recent push to giving gold sounds pretty cool.
The userbase would balk. Private subreddits are already a feature. Asking users to pay money for something they currently use for free would tick off power users who have ungodly influence among the users. I think I get what you're talking about, but Reddit is not like Github enough to pull that off.
http://www.reddit.com/gold/about