Reddit was originally about the content, with the users being an afterthought. Thats why there weren't bios and avatars and all the other crap common amongst web2.0 social sites of the time.

Gold started out as a little donation thing, with a few minor perks, like no ads, longer pages, seen comment remembering, and so forth. Nothing groundbreaking, just more of a "thanks for helping" thing.

Sometime in the 10s, after the OG reddit admins left, and reddit became "independent" of condé, they started chasing user engagement. Profiles, avatars, bios, userpage posts, and, of course, all the award spam. All of it antithetical to what reddit was initially about.

IMO the original vision of reddit was great. I keep avatars turned off on my lemmy user, because I don't really care to see em.