To be fair the awards system was complete dogshit and just became a rich man’s upvote and a way to financially brigade comments.

I remember the days when /r/the_donald gilded hateful comments/posts to game Reddit’s frontpage.

Awards well and truly jumped the shark when the admins took Reddit Silver, a meme pic that people would often post to mock the act of gilding, and make that into an award that offered the recipient nothing other than a silver crudely-drawn emblem by their comment.

Normally I’d support the removal of this feature, but it’s blatantly obvious they did it because Reddit’s top payers abandoned the site and because they were fed up with watching “fuck u/Spez” posts getting gilded.