Painting Reddit as a monolith in general is a problem, too. “Reddit is toxic?” Some subs, sure. But certainly not the ones I subscribed to. Some of them might have had bad actors here and there. But they were usually dealt with by the mods.
In the end, the only toxicity that drove me away from Reddit was the toxicity from the CEO.
So someone did some math and figured out that the award system was unprofitable somehow?
Don’t know how that works out.
Or maybe they are willing to take the hit because they are embarrassed when posts and comments criticizing Reddit get a ton of awards? (Plenty of people already have a large cache of Reddit coins, so handing out an award is not necessarily paying anything to Reddit at the time of award.)