How did you come by your information?

I should have specified Comment Karma. You’re correct that Post Karma has existed from Day 1.

Bringing in Comment Karma had a downside, it fed the trolls. You can see in this post here, from about 9 years ago, when Reddit had finally had enough of negative karma trolls (people trying to get the lowest comment karma possible) and stopped tallying it after a certain point.

Things sometimes get a bit blurry for me after all these years. I’d been on there so long I remember when Reddit added the ability for users to create sub-reddits!

But what relevance does gold have to content?

Reddit Rewards, like Gold, provided a visibility boost to both Posts and Comments. The_Donald famously abused this to keep the Reddit front page full of MAGA content. It eventually got so bad that Reddit Inc had to introduce emergency FP content filtering, something they’d resisted doing for years, while they rejiggered the algorithm in order to stop it. It was subsequently abused on comments all over reddit to keep something visible that otherwise would have been auto-collapsed due to downvotes. It was famously abused again because it was possible to send messages to someone, even someone who had blocked you, if you sent them a Reddit Reward.

Speaking of changes there’s another one. User blocking. Reddit didn’t have that 15 years ago either.

Reddit was a long and wild ride and a lot of things changed after I showed up in April of 2008.