Maybe they hope that by disabling awards in September there suddenly will be a lot less premium users. Gold and platinum gave a week and a month after all. So there will be a sudden spike in ad revenue just before the planed IPO.
You, a random internet anon, decoded a potential financial strategy.
So do the big capital funds not have analyst teams who also decode that? Why would a big-time investor fall for a ploy so simple it can be explained in 3 sentences on a non-financial forum?
It would still show higher potential earnings, which is all investors care about. Even if they tell investors exactly why revenue is up, and they probably will, investors will see that and say "great! Guess premiums not coming back!"
If you are gifted gold or platinum, you get short term Reddit Premium for free. You didn’t pay for it, but you get to not watch ads.
Reddit removes to ability to gift gold and platinum, and this removes the ability to be gifted out of seeing ads, and now your eyeballs are in poverty Reddit full of ads.
It’s kind of a dumb because Reddit could keep gold and platinum awards and just make them not gift premium features to the recipient anymore, but put no stupid plan past Reddit.
I think like the other comments here it’s going to be some kind of self-paid promotion bump to shoot your own comments to the top of threads.