Definitely. I'd been chatting with Drew about lessons learned from TotalFark for quite some time before Gold.

Props to the guy I'm replying to, for cultivating a community that was receptive to crazy ideas like this.

SomethingAwful has had something like that since the early 2000s as well, with some things being purely status, like paying an extra $10 to get a bigger avatar image. Also introduced as a (successful) solution to their previous lack of success monetizing via ads.

(I believe, at least for a while, you could also change someone else's avatar for something like $20 or $30, and they could pay some similar amount to insure it against changes.)