I could see cryptobros and the “investing” subs spending a lot on this. They were already buying tons of awards to hype themselves up.
Any unironic circlejerk cult will by buying these and pinning them on each other’s chest, same as the dumbass awards.
I think reddit knows their target audience pretty well; Rubes. That’s why they let all the toxic “stock”, crypto-scam and political extremist subs stay open until the media starts writing stories about them. Gullible idiots spend a lot of money trying to make their opinions look smart and popular.
This will make Reddit a lot of money in the short-term, but probably push more legitimate/casual users away as these “premium upvotes” will surely effect the algorithm and push more nonsense into people’s feeds.
Now that i think about it, this will probably help advertisers and political groups astroturf all of reddit.