[gigglesupstairs]

Awards still exist. They just streamlined them. Instead of 100 different awards which cluttered the interface right below the post title, they replaced them with 6-7 variations of gold and simplified the UI and look & feel.

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah, the main thing is that

1) they don't show on old reddit (I see this as an absolute win)

2) You can't Gold NSFW subs, because....

3) A number of Gold upvotes + posting karma can be exchanged for real world money. Yes, this is probably even worse than what you are imagining. To give a few details of this wonderful idea:

   - They say you need to "qualify", but the bar is 10 gold upvotes + 100 karma in 12 months. 100 karma may as well not be a barrier.
   - They have pretty weak justifications for how to fight Spam/bots... because they've done a horrible job the last decade fighting spam/bots and it's only gotten worse last year. There's no incentive for them to fight bots anyway. 
  - Mods can participate in this. And it is not based on their moderation behavior

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/16ryhv9/celebrating...

There's not much upside here as a user unless you need yet another hustle in life.

[rightbyte]

I think making the post look like a pimped Pakistani truck was much of the lure.

Making a number go from 4 to 5 probably does not have the same lure for the whales.

[gigglesupstairs]

Thing is not many were buying expensive awards when smaller much much cheaper awards were available at their disposal. They perhaps found from their research that giving so much choice to users was working against them in this case and took this decision.

[RichEO]

This kind of logic leads to websites riddled with dark patterns. Just because something works in an A/B test doesn’t make it a good decision.

[gigglesupstairs]

As much as I deride any kind of awards except classic gold, I think this was one of their better decisions all things considered.