I don’t love the awards from Reddit, but I would like to see something like this (unpopular opinion, I know). Instances need funding.
I don’t care about what the awards are themselves, I care about the way the funding works. I would love to see the funds split in a two tiered system.
Here is a general example of my idea. When a award is purchased it gets split into two pots. One pot is a general pot that gets disbursed to those running the instances based on whatever metrics and intervals agreed upon. The other part gets assigned to the reward itself. So in this example let’s say an award costs one dollar. 90 cents would go to the pool to be split, the other 10 cents would be tied to the award. So if you award a post on an instance it goes specifically to that instance itself. Instances could even set a percent split with community moderators of the 10 cents. That way you could fund moderators (if that ever becomes needed)
You could even split part of the award reward with the commentor assigned to it… but that puts a weird feeling in my gut and I feel like it is a bad idea to monetize the content itself.
There is a lot you could do with this and a lot more would need to be fleshed out, so I am just thinking out loud.