Reddit answers to shareholders and a board of directors. Each fediverse instance is run by its owner and negotiates with other instances to federate.
If some bigshot wants to own reddit or rule it like a totalitarian asshole, he can buy it and vandalize it if he wants to. If some bigshot wants to own the fediverse, good luck buying the thousands of instances that exist and they still wouldn't get us, because we'd move to or create new instances.
It wasn't that bad, gold just signals that the comment is good (intensity), but some of the other awards made explicit the way in which it is good (hue/flavour) e.g. funny, informative, creative, sarcastic...I actually liked the award system (even if I always was a bit suspicious of who was giving them and what their intentions were)