Well, if you want to premarket my idea with your non-premarketed concept: We just have a whitelisted (write-protected) relay, but we allow anyone to send zap events. And I've set a sat lower-threshold in the new client that displays the zap comments in the replies, as if it were a kind 1 or 1111 reply, but with a ⚡ icon on it. So, you can pay-to-respond by putting your message into the zap. We moderate the relay, so if you put something horrendous in the zap message, we delete the event and you lose your money.

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I order the zaps at the top of the thread, with the highest zaps first. So, you can pay to get higher up the list. And subscribers can also do this, otherwise their replies are just below the zaps. I think I have the lower-bound set to 20 sats, since 21 seems to be a significant number. If there are too many shenanigans, I'll just keep raising the price, until they stop.
I like this. I think Damus also displays the zaps like that, right @jb55? But does your client make it so people only read replies from that specific relay? Because I think that's a step in the path to solving spam.