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Indeed, a periodical subscription (say $10) with a number of posts or comments included would serve the same purpose.

Gee this sounds like telephone billing...

And telephones are well known to completely free of all spam.

do you think spammers would pay with their own money? lol

Because they sell blockchain

Not the OP, but I could imagine a system where instead of paying money, a sender might have to calculate a certain number of hashes. In this way, mining on a blockchain would be a substitute for actual payment.

There are many other problems with this (not least of which being the amount of energy required now just to send a message).

As I recall Bill Gates proposed doing this for email in his book "The Road Ahead" in 1995.

The blockchain infrastructure allows decentralization of the transaction payments. Are there other ways to do that?

The payment need not be decentralized for such a scheme to work (if it would work at all).

You're right, but I was specifically talking about a decentralized social network.