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.