Ha, you think that's a novel, try this on for size.

To respond to your first point, I'd agree this would likely stop some trolls but those with such a low standard wouldn't likely be that much of a concern once banned once or twice. The power trolls are the real concern, the ones who will do lasting damage, and the ones more than willing to "find" $100. Power trolls are more common than you think, kiwi farms has alot of people using it even after their anti-DDOS service got taken away. Look at 4chan too, they can be absurdly dedicated and have quite a few participants when they do a troll campaign.

For your second though, a ban is against one account. With $100 over a good amount of time, that's 20 accounts. You won't get them all, it's impossible to sort between alts and people who simply agree. Also, to reiterate but more clearly, that $100 doesn't have to be theirs. You can buy credit cards, visa cards, and crypto wallets for cheap and they're not exactly hard to find, or to steal yourself. 5 people, $25, can swing the vote easily. Especially with a smaller voting pool.

to go off on a tangent:

To prime my next point more so than to respond directly, Alot of damage can be done too while keeping it, mostly, clean. "Games journalism is in the gutter", "look at IGN scores, they're meaningless", "You can't trust anyone at major publications for their opinions if they're all paid by these companies" to name some reasonable takes, primes the discussion for: "and look, this 'woman' had sex with a reviewer to get a better score". (a fiction) "This girl is attempting to kill the game industry", "(((they))) are using race to destroy your favorite games, the addition of blacks into this series is woke culture gone mad. Look at this girl, she has connections to blizzard. Look and this black character. Coincidence?" All real examples, directed at real people, but the point of the rest was to prime for their target. In those examples, small indie game devs who happened to be women, gay, or black were harmed.

There are 15 unique "aye"s in this group, it'll take 16 accounts to change the tides permanently. What happens when the question is "should we allow gamer-gate content" or another, more sinister group. Nazism is getting more and more frequent. What happens when the accounts are just for the voting, not the spread of hate? Will they get banned? not likely.

All that is still a problem under other, non monetized systems but I'd like to re-iterate another point.

This makes power five dollars. My concern is that this filters out most of the common users and allows in only the most power hungry. People online are extremely unlikely to pay 5 dollars for a service they love to use. We're talking 5% of active users being an amazing turnover. What's it going to look like when we sort out from the 17 accounts who voted today those willing to send money? I will not not be one of them. This doesn't mean that only the most dedicated users get in, this simply means that those willing to spend money for power will have said power. This selects for the power hungry, and does nothing to stop the dedicated trolls who will slowly erode what they can towards their goal.

The other methods will help with these trolls, even the more dedicated, but selecting for willingness to pay does, in my opionion, nothing to stop the real damage. It would stop the most blatant but as I've stated those are the most likely to get banned and stop. Our current system does nothing too but I would like to see this improve. As you've stated, direct demovracy without guard rails fails. We've tried democracy for only those willing to pay before too, and we see similarly terrible outcomes. As for my comment on

True democracy. Only land owners paying members ^tm^ can vote

even with a perfect outcome, no trolls come in due to the pay gate, the people voting will be selected for the most power hungry. I do think this should be off the table. I cannot see the people willing to pay for power being a good selection of the population to decide how it's run.

Luckily, lemmy allows users to decide their moseration. If we see this come into being, I will leave this instance, and lose very little. Our feet have a lot more power here my friend.