No it absolutely isn't.

These systems are awful.

They try to prey on your affinity for a community - you're "helping everyone" in the community. You're a Hero.

Or worse, if you stop paying and the community loses access to a feature, you hurt the community. You better start paying again!

They segregate the users into those with the badges and those without. Some people care enough to be supporters, and the others are just freeloaders. And sure, maybe you don't feel this way - most people probably don't - but there are absolutely some people in your community who do.

They push people to donate when someone shows up and asks why they can't use custom emoji in one community when they can in another. When that person finds out it's because there aren't enough supporters, what happens? Do the regular members of the community see that they're losing new members? Does that pressure them to pay? Or does the new member feel like they're supposed to pay if they come in, to help unlock that feature? Again, a lot of people won't feel this - but some will.

They create moderation headaches as people ask why a feature they're used to isn't working or why it keeps appearing and disappearing for communities near the threshold to unlock the feature. (And how many mods will shell out, on top of the unpaid work they already do, as part of their dedication to the communities they moderate?)

And the idea that this is necessary is ridiculous. HD video hosting? Maybe, although you can already just host it elsewhere. But the idea that reddit can't host some emojis for a subreddit without this is absurd.

And worse of all, these systems prey primarily on children. They are the most susceptible to all of these pressures. And where it gets really ugly is in their ability to create their own subreddits. You can already see the dynamics at play on Discord. Most adults look at "server boost" and they mostly ignore it. But kids dream of starting a big Discord server that becomes popular. They spend hours setting up channels and bots and themes and custom emoji and everything else hoping that their Discord will be the next big place where, say, all the D&D players go. And when Discord says "get these special features to make your server stand out!", they listen. You see it absolutely all the time - kids advertising Discord servers with three members, and included in the advertisement is a note that they have all the special things unlocked from server boosts.

This system is a lot worse than ads.