Paywalls are great at stopping spammers. And membership for groups is hardly an internet only thing.

Haven't tried Hyper, but the nft gated discords I use are much nicer places to hang out and chat and make things together. In the past year ive gone from using discord maybe once a month to it being my main internet social-space. Even better is that most of the memberships feed back into the group accounts.

I'm curious why you have such a strong reaction against this though, I much prefer it to adverts.