They had a bad outage around a year ago which was the first time I saw the "emergency read-only" notice. Back then, the metric was "age of account". Even though by that metric, I would have been one of the first users back, I really don't mind that the Gold users are being let in on a "biased random" basis. As ceejayoz said, "why shouldn't it be the ones that contributed financially"?

The three metrics mentioned so far all have issues, but I think I like yours the least.

Gold - "Thanks for helping fund the site. Hopefully your dollars will let us hire folks that will ensure this doesn't happen again." Age - "Thanks for sticking by our little site through all of our outages. We know you've had to put up with a lot, but we appreciate it." Karma - "Thanks for all the cats. We love cats."

I realize that I'm lumping a lot of users who post great informative content in with the "better drink my own piss" image macro crowd, but karma just doesn't seem like the best metric here.

It's also harder to come up with a good threshold for karma. Where do you draw the line? 10k karma? 100k? Are we only including comment karma or submission karma? Both?

At least the Gold members have, in general, unambiguously contributed to the site. I don't have a problem using that as the primary metric here.

(I should note that I'm a reddit plebeian in this regard. I have no golden dog in this fight.)