User blog comment:Khalael/A Simple Proposition/@comment-25033299-20130427230109/@comment-1745925-20130428023031

I must agree with neck here. I would postulate that the creation of different "tiers" or article ranks would divide users based on the articles they can create and cause an elitist atmosphere with those who have high-ranked articles.

Even should the best-case scenario occur and this does not happen, it is still a division of users based on their "article quality" which in itself is an entirely subjective term. Dividing users based on article quality strikes me as quite anti-egalitarian.

The subjectiveness of this should not be overlooked. One man's excellent article is another's "meh" article. This puts the entire thing into the hands of admins who make their own judgement calls and can be influenced by simple things like how much they like the user who requested it. For that potential for abuse alone it should - if it were implemented - should have strict controls over how the admins use it, and even then it still isn't foolproof because of the subjective nature. I also suspect attempts to enforce the controls will cause unnecessary division among the admins themselves, but without the controls we have a system open to abuse.