I'd love for either the Warpcast team or a dedicated client for direct casts offer a pay to message feature - you pay into escrow, and if the other party responds, the funds are sent to the other party

This incentivizes responses to important DCc, and esp for some people it literally puts a value on their time

You could probably enhance it further by letting the sending party decide whether the response was satisfactory before releasing the escrow funds

This could all be done with Warps or USDC

We've considered this, but I suspect the people the market would value the attention of the most aren't motivated enough by per message fees.

Still may be useful as a primitive for marketing messages, though.

Seems many people on Twitter who “don’t need the money” still were quite excited to talk about getting paid from tweeting.

You’re probably right about top 1% globally popular but people can still be very important in a niche who would like free money.