I used baconreader, it was always ad free, so gold never actually did anything at all for me, they were always useless.
I thought that was the whole point of killing 3rd parties... either you get the feed full of ads that pay them via clicks, or you pony up for the gold.
The gold system allowed reddit to collect revenue from payers to give premium to non-payers. Basically it meant a non payer could pay. They're eliminating that aspect. They're reducing the number of people that can have paid access...
I don't know what their intent is, but removing gold isnt logical, and it's doubly illogical since the disabling of third parties increased the relevance of gold dramatically.
It's like they went out and set up a T-ball stand and put the ball on it to set themselves up for a nice home run, and are now walking up and kicking the tee out from under the ball. Dafuq are they thinking?