Albeit the effect may very depending on the amount of the fee, I find it hard to imagine fee would stop the bot problem. World of Warcraft requires fee for accessing the most recent expansion, as well as the subscription, but it is swarmed by the bots all the same. IMO as long as there are traffic aka money, there will be bots.

> I want to see a social network that solves the bot problem by requiring a fee to post.

I think this is doable without losing massive numbers of users. You could do it by requiring a small fee to post publicly, but you could post for free to your followers.

BlueSky kind of flirts with this model because you have to pay to get your own domain if you don't want to use theirs.

Medium does the inverse of this, but sort of the same idea. Content creators are rewarded money from a pool of subscription revenue based on community involvement. I think rewarding good content is more powerful than some barrier to entry.

> I want to see a social network that solves the bot problem by requiring a fee to post.

Why would people pay to post? Why do people post in the first place?

It exists: well.com

Requiring the fee to post will suppress poor people, not spammers. Bad actors will happily pay to spread/promote spam/misinformation.

Metafilter.com