I think payment should be optional.
Optional payment to vote? Witcoin required a payment to vote, so there was very little voting. And thus very little content posted because there was very little financial reward coming from those very few who actually did vote.
After spending a decent amount of time studying the concept, I suggested making it essentially a quasi-gambling website. The way I proposed it would work made the social voting task to be a form of gambling because there cost to vote was basically a wager. If you voted and were in the early third of votes for the post, you would profit ... nearly doubling your money. If you were in the middle third, the amount you paid to vote is returned ... i.e., you broke even. And those in the bottom, later third got nothing returned.
So that makes an incentive for voting on the good stuff (profit as some of those votes will be in the early third) and a disincentive to vote on the bad stuff (likelihood that you will lose money as fewer people will be voting).
If then the winners (those in the early third) get profit of, let's say, 90% that was lost by the later third then the remaining 10% goes to compensate the content poster and a little bit to the site as well. This profit potential creates an incentive for better content to be posted.
The problem I couldn't figure out at the time was how easy it would be for an algorithm to game the system. Instead the rewards should only go to those who truly read the content and vote because the content is good. At that point it became a problem harder than I wanted to figure out and lost interest.
Perhaps you could bet on the best answer like a prediction market for knowledge lol.
If you can get input, then you should try to run with it. The last thing you should do is take a combative attitude with potential users.
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