Paying users for their posts is what killed YouTube, Twitter Facebook, Instagram... You will only get shitty ragebait comments. Not to mention that you have to link some bank account with your full name, etc.

This sounds like a platform that has no appeal to the average person, and an incredible appeal to people wishing to launder money or use money to run an influence campaign. Deliberately determining popularity proportionally to the amount of money spent is little different than advertising, but this would be under the false premise of "someone thought this was important/valuable enough to pay money to suggest I see it".

If this were to exist today, I know I would be incredibly critical of it.

I’m missing something. What’s the incentive for people to pay to upvote or comment?

It seems like that would lead to a proliferation of ragebait, deliberately controversial posts, and overly simplistic articles to attract the greatest amount of comments. I frequently see deeply technical high-value posts on HN with very few comments but each thread about politics ends up getting hundreds of comments.

+1 let's make this

You could build this on ATProto.

What's stopping you from building it yourself?