It is quite crazy. People will have time until Sept. 12 to spend their coins on awards … and then Reddit will delete all gilded awards from every post. WTF? Why even use them at all from now on?

This thing reeks of control. Reddit is trying to prohibit people from giving undesired opinions more visibility. In the past sometimes comments received awards that were not in line with advertisers. Now by removing this feature, these comments can only receive an up- or downvote but do not stand out by gilded awards anymore. And the up- and downvote is something that can easily be twiddled with behind the scenes to the desired outcome. It was much harder to remove awards from a comment, as the person who gave them out, would recognize it immediately. But who can proof that their up/downvote was not counted correctly… it is the perfect manipulation.

See also: Guided democracy

In a guided democracy, the government controls elections such that the people can exercise democratic rights without truly changing public policy. While they follow basic democratic principles, there can be major deviations towards authoritarianism. Under managed democracy, the state’s continuous use of propaganda techniques prevents the electorate from having a significant impact on policy.[3] It is today widely employed in Russia, where it was introduced into common practice by Kremlin theorists, in particular Gleb Pavlovsky.

I mean you're assuming this isn't happening more in reverse to platform disinformation: take a look at any trans related thread in a UK sub and you'll see the most useless leap of faith transphobe comments receive 5 gold while the more scientific pro trans comments are buried far, far down the chain.

Also, equating gilding with democracy is odd - we live in a world where economic inequality is growing. Who can afford the most gold? It's not the poor/disabled/other minorities who have important views that need to be heard - they can't afford to give 5 gold to random reddit comments they agree with because they're statistically earning less.

Buying gold is not democratic. There's a reason you can't just (directly) buy votes in elections. This is still a shitty move on Reddit's part, but for a different reason than hurting democracy.