Reddit is replacing / modifying the Reddit gold feature, what are your thoughts ?

I wouldn't call gold an important feature. When it was first built, gold was supposed to be a little supplement to reddit. You'd get a badge on your profile, ad free reddit, access to r/lounge, and larger pages (load ALL comments). That was pretty much it.

When reddit rolled out the awards, they came with other anti-features, like avatars, profile pages, bios, and others, that tended to stray from what reddit was originally about: the content. Digg was heavily criticized for placing an emphasis on certain celebrity users, making their votes count more.

Eh, I wouldn't call it an important feature. More like a perk.

Reddit's c-suite is in this pursuit-of-profit-at-any-cost mode even if it means destroying the platform. I'll go with a cynical yet general guess of they'll replace it with something they think will bring in more money, that it will be exploitive of the user base, that it will make the overall experience worse, andthey'll continue to ignore the actual problems that need addressing.

I guess they realized there might be some power users they haven’t pissed off, and decided they had better do something about that.

Lmao.

I don't gamble because gambling is a sin. But I suspect it will be something along the lines of paying for karma and paying to get your threads on the front page. It will then evolve to paying to get your messages first and paying to keep your community active. Why let those peasants who have a PS5 manage their own community when Sony would pay to have their guy managing it?