When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's that going to work?
None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the mechanics.
P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.
Just charging $2 might be a huge improvement over reddit because it makes sock puppets cost too much to scale.
Paying out for upvotes, I fear will incentivize lowest-common-denominator content. If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't be from an expert solving your very specific problem. And more generally, I worry it will reward that twitter-style, shrill political dunking, binary thinking, maximalism and in-group point scoring. This may be a recipe for an even more toxic r/politics.
Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive structure will play out in practice.
Wouldn't it be highly coincidental if the Top posts contain a solution to your specific problem.