The awards on this are horribly tone-deaf. Yes, pay the man for fucking you over. I can't believe abstracting payment with goofy little icons makes people so willing to fork over their cash even in situations like this.
As bitwisefool mentioned, anecdotally, a lot of those awards are using free coins or whatever, not from people actually paying money to give them out.
You get them free with Reddit Premium which does have other (dubious) benefits.
Redditors often use the awards as a way to send a message that stands out from a regular replies. Reddit also gives away freebie points on occasion in order to entice users into getting into the habit of awarding posts. So it's possible a lot of those rewards are disgruntled redditors using their free rewards to send him a message.
I feel like, in general, awards signal astroturfing. I wouldn't put it past Reddit to astroturf their own AMA.
Personally I still have credits from when they bought Alien Blue.