Honestly, aside from the weird rate limiting, I have no issue with Elon making people pay for the badge.

Reason being for a large traditional platform like that, the only current tried and true options for revenue are subscriptions and voluntary donations, vs data brokering and advertiser revenue.

Data brokering and advertisers are pure fucking evil, and wrt to the latter, totally susceptible to gov't and special interest pressure/coercion. So any attempt to break free of that has my support.

That said, do I think a better system exists? Absolutely, and that's why I'm here and not on Twitter/FB/Reddit.

I really hope Nostr is able to open the door for self-actualized social networking, and even beyond into areas like crowd-sourced industry.