What is "Reddit gold" in the cultural sense vs. the literal award?

In the literal sense, Reddit Gold is an award that users can purchase with real money and give to posts or comments they consider exceptional. The original system, introduced around 2011, gave the recipient a week of Reddit Premium — access to an ad-free experience, exclusive lounge subreddits, and a small coin allowance — along with a gold badge displayed on their comment. The idea was to let users signal genuine appreciation for outstanding content through a mechanism more emphatic than an upvote, while also financially supporting Reddit's infrastructure. Over time, Reddit expanded and repeatedly redesigned its award ecosystem, adding Silver, Platinum, and hundreds of community-specific awards. In 2023, Reddit deprecated the legacy coin and award system entirely in favor of a program that paid out real money to eligible content creators, causing significant community backlash from users attached to the old system. Reddit later reversed course partially, reintroducing a version of the award system. In the cultural sense, "being gilded" — particularly receiving gold — became a marker of having said something the community considered unusually valuable, insightful, funny, or moving. The phrase "thanks for the gold, kind stranger!" became such a Reddit cliché that it evolved into ironic self-parody. Receiving gold was used as social proof: a comment with a gold badge had been deemed worth real money by someone, which influenced how other readers perceived it. The cultural meaning always exceeded the literal one. Gold was less about the Premium access it conferred and more about the recognition it symbolized. It represented the community saying "this was worth more than a click." Its repeated redesign and eventual temporary removal illustrated a tension between Reddit's commercialization goals and its community's attachment to the specific cultural artifacts that made Reddit feel distinct from other platforms.