Honestly just more proof that we need decentralization of the Internet. Handing over control of our digital platforms and identities to 3rd party for-profit companies is not the way the internet should work.
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Conspiracy theories and baseless nonsense is the price you pay to be able to criticize those in power. It is a price worth paying.
If the information is useful and worth reading, the viewer will pay back the publisher, an amount which covers the initial publishing cost and additional revenue for the publisher.
Conversely, if the information is garbage or incorrect, the viewer will not pay the fee and it will be a loss for the publisher.
The payments can be small, cheap and fast via Bitcoin's Lightning Network.
I think the main problem with twitter is scale: Because the network allows you to reach the whole world it also is a big target for disinformation networks and the sheer volume of posts makes it uneconomical to moderate.
If you look at mastodon, the instance I'm on has about 600 monthly active users. That's pretty easy for an admin to handle. If a bunch of users show up orchestrating a disinfo campaign the admin would notice, and if an instance is a source of disinfo it can be blocked.
Instance will stop federating with other instances if they are too much to deal with, so admins are incentivized not to grow beyond what they could moderate, to maintain access to the fediverse.
Then the rich most likely win, whether they are right or wrong.
And given How wrong Trump is on many things (including what he himself has said in the past) that is not going to be a good thing. Yes there will be popular gatherings where many people put in a bit to counteract disinformation from small groups of well funded individuals (or just one well funded individual) but those things take with organised orchestration or luck (often both) to be successful, more so than the actions of smaller groups or individuals.
While this would reduce individual knuckle-draggers shouting from the rooftops because they feel slighted, and would reduce knee-jerk reactions somewhat, it wouldn't shift the balance of power significantly at all at the top end, it would just change how score is kept.
> If the information is useful and worth reading ... if the information is garbage or incorrect
This has exactly the same problem as the current situation: how do the people who currently believe (and propagate) misinformation behave any differently under this scheme? They might not forward the misinformation as much due to the cost, but that same will happen with provable facts because the cost is universal so the current balance probably wouldn't be upset.
Thus Facebook isn't one giant blob of people yelling at each other, but has huge numbers of groups where people can meet, while also being able to find/contact almost anyone else. Of course I participate in small decentralized forums relevant to my specific interests/hobbies, but I don't only watch those, and you probably don't either. That would be like only ever reading local news and skipping news about your state/country/international events. You can do that but you'll be putting yourself at a big disadvantage, which most people prefer not to do.
I'm really bugged by the leap of logic that fact checkers will supposedly always parrot the government line, when even this specific thread itself is about a fact checker existing that's going against the president's line.
There's not really any "publisher" anyway. Everyone is an equal participant. A two-way conversation is one where each user attaches some money to each message to effectively bypass a spam filter and have their message promoted to the top of the recipient's feed. The back and forth sending of money means that neither participant is earning or losing - they're just swapping money.
It is only costly if you are sending messages out and getting no responses. (Ie, nobody wants to converse with you or subscribe to receive future messages from you). Meaning your information is garbage or uninteresting.
Wealthy people will be forced to provide good or engaging content in order to continue receiving revenue. If they're just putting out junk information then they'll eventually just be burning money as they won't be able to develop a reputation and nobody will subscribe to receiving future content from them.
SPAM would be profitable in this scenario. Each advertisement a user receives in their feed will have money attached to it. The advert can be ignored, in which case the recipient keeps the money, or the advert might be clicked or have a promotion code used to make a purchase - in which case the advertiser then knows whether the recipient is interested in their products and will likely pay a higher fee next time to promote their adverts up the user's feed. The advertiser then has a strong incentive to limit the messages they put out and instead focus on who they're delivering them to.
In the current situation, it is simply too cheap (zero cost) to publish. The costs, if any, are subsidized by good content or user's data being sold to advertisers. By putting a cost on publishing, the good content is paid for directly and the bad content is largely ignored - demoted to the bottom of each user's information feed.