It could be leftover credit that people are using up. There's a fair bit of it floating around, giving awards used to give points too so it's hard to say if anyone actually gave them money to give the gold.

I had over 15000 Reddit coins when I cancelled my premium subscription last month. I’ve had it since they handed out years of premium when they killed Alien Blue. When it ran out I decided I enjoyed paying for no ads and still remembered when they’d tell you how much server time you paid for and would announce all the new servers coming online that came from gold users.

Anyway I used to get a kick out of spending my coins on people who hated it. I handed out more than a few in June, but it was money already spent.

Many people had coins/points left over from back when they were giving them out for free. I gave my last free gold to people who suggested kbin as a matter of fact