I'd like a reddit-like site that is more exclusive, it filters out the non-serious users with a yearly subscription fee of say $100.
This exists: https://www.metafilter.com/
The fee is $5 which turns out to be an insurmountable barrier for just about everyone. I personally like the site very much.
The retro interface was nice but the populace was incredibly homogeneous and everything was saturated with San Francisco liberal politics. I concluded that the insurmountable joining fees led the website to be frozen with a small self-referential community.
I've since quit Reddit but comments here have convinced me to take a second look. I think this time around I will put even more filters in place, like no subreddits with over 10k subs, and some way to hide everyone's karma count including my own.
I guess what I'm trying to say is maybe you and I don't need a pay wall to filter, we just need an opinionated browser plugin (or easy way to share settings in RES)