I mostly don’t understand why they made so many different awards. I thought Gold was a cool way of a user supporting Reddit while also showing their gratitude toward another user. After all, users cared about karma even though it didn’t really do anything so an award was just an extra “tip” of appreciation.

It definitely lost its luster to me though once they changed it to awards and it became messy.

Mods are unpaid “workers” that make it possible for Reddit to be appealing to advertisers and be potentially viable to go public. Framing the story around them gives outsiders a reason to think that admins are doing something that will make their unpaid jobs harder (which is true) and gives them someone to feel bad for.

Otherwise the story is a bunch of non-paying users of Reddit are upset that a company wants to regain control over the ad revenue 3rd party app creators take instead, either through ads on their own platforms or premium memberships. Which I do think there is more nuance because Reddit is only as powerful as their user base so maybe they deserve some concessions, but the average news reader who isn’t on Reddit won’t understand that.

Just to clarify, I’m annoyed as well and not saying we shouldn’t take our contributors and lurkers elsewhere. I moved over to Lemmy as a RIF user and refuse to use the app. Just giving the likely answer to the question!