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I thought awards were fine. Though I used Apollo, and it tastefully displayed them and never had giant highlight boxes around comments or any other adornment nonsense.
In smaller communities they had symbolic value. In massive ones it was kinda just noise. But like I said, not really an issue on Apollo.
Describing the various ways in which you mitigated the intrusiveness of reddit's awards is not exactly corroborating your argument that the awards were fine. I'm also struggling to see the symbolic value of a badge that indicates you paid the administrators. The award system did not build upon the original sorting mechanism of upvotes in any meaningful way.
It was never intended to build upon the original sorting mechanism, it was intended to be a super upvote that granted the receiver elevated privileges. It used to get you into an exclusive subreddit, turn off the ads, and give you discounts at stores across the internet. But then people memed on it and the admin decided to indulge the memes.
Gold wasn't ever even supposed to be that. When raldi (iirc) wrote the original gold system, it was just supposed to be a donator thing. Buy the gold stuff, and you get an award in your achievements thing, access to r/lounge, ability to keep track of what you've seen previously (persistent, not just in a cookie), and "extended" pages (load a full thousand comments, etc). The XKCD merch stuff was just another goodie to sweeten the pile (reddit's original merch store was just hosted through XKCD).
Gold gifting started out fairly clunky; you had to go to someone's userpage, and then there was a tiny "buy gold" link in the sidebar. The post/comment upsells came later, but were still pretty minor
Then sometime in the middle of the 10s, it turned into a meme, along with other features like snoovatars, avatars, profile posts, bios, and then eventually all of the new reddit slop, which seemed to run counter to the original idea of reddit: the content is more important than who is posting it. This old, long dead ideal, was what really distinguished reddit from Digg. Digg would give higher "karma" users votes more weight, and would rank their submissions higher. Reddit, on the other hand, barely acknowledged users. Wasn't quite the full-on Anon of 4chan, but who made the post was never supposed to be the focus. There's a reason why old reddit, the bylines are rather small compared to the posts and comments themselves
I forgot about all those extra aspects.
But that’s not true, all of those things were there at launch. It was just reddit gold, which got you a month of premium along with all those perks.
That’s a good point about how I mitigated the worst aspects.
I have a similar feeling about Twitter. I hate algorithmic status/tweet timelines. But I never had them, due to third party clients. So I was in a different world when it came to Twitter.
And I think we just fundamentally disagree about the value of the awards in smaller communities. It does not matter to me if they had value for sorting. They had social value.
Most awards were anonymous afaik, or at the least the awarder name was not prominent or important to anyone. So the idea it was a badge to puff up the awarder does not hold weight for me.