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It would still be free-to-use, and their visibility won't even be downgraded necessarily. They just can't earn until they figure out how to pay. So, it's more like "join our community for free, but have some buy-in before you have the privilege to earn from others."
If we could figure it out without creating a class system that is based on privilege which in turn is based on how much money you got (extrinsic too, ugh!) then that would have my personal preference. If not, and all the big brain 1st worlders think that being in the haves club warrants keeping out the not-haves, because other haves are misbehaving, then this sounds pretty much like a solution the oppressive overworld society most of us live in today would implement, and I'd be a sad opti.
Can't there just be a place where we can share experiences and learn and grow on the internet anymore? Is the internet as it was in the 90s truly dead? Absorbed by greed and hunger for power? I wonder sometimes... today is such a time. Disillusion wins.
My implementation of zaprank was too biased toward teleporting back to the seeds in the random walk. The only thing we want trust for is excluding bots/zap cycles/sock puppets. The high teleportation probability made too few haves and too many have-nots. We want it the other way around. The seeds should only exist as graph cycle breakers.
I think that's the real solution to most of this because most of it is solved by having some signal - just a little because money can do the rest - to tell who is here to share experiences and learn and grow on the internet.
LLMs and @SimpleStacker should be able to help me make it do that without creating a privileged class again. I'll make another pass once the last leg of the wallet marathon ends.
I wasn't criticizing the former implementation though, but the idea to gatekeep everyone new by the amount of sats they have, just because some botbois are being a little disruptive. Versus that newly proposed solution here, the former implementation as-was is also imho superior, because it doesn't gatekeep in absolutes.
I think that with the former algo, what you assess as the bias toward teleporting back to the seed, and what I see as the downstream flow of reputation/trust, and with that the upstream flow of power, being too steep, is describing the same phenomenon.
From that perspective, I haven't muted the bots and we've been arguing a couple of hours now, yet I haven't encountered a single bot. So I think that we should also not over-dramatize the size of the bot issue.
If, in response to bots, the message to new users is "buy bitcoin or gtfo", then I think that we've indeed destroyed the user experience for new, human, non-bitcoiner users.