Why do you think the tokens (if structured the right way) couldn't drive incentive? Each token is worth one message. This would have to be well thought out but it would eventually become a "pay-to-tweet" service which is fair because there has to be a small cost for the service. Just as there is a small cost to use any blockchain technology.
Because you can't have everything. If people are supposed to use the coin to pay for their tweets then the price of that coin has to be low. You can't keep the price low, the market decides that. If it goes up, people won't be willing to post and if the price dumps the chain becomes insecure. The price has to be enough to create incentive for miners to mine that coin and if the difficulty goes up it has to go up to justify the increased amount of work they have to do.
I think this is debatable because you could build the rewards (creation of new token) to change overtime depending on network use. Example would be DOGE. It is low cost per token, secure, and low cost to send although transactions per second isn't huge. This is a whole separate discussion and since we are just throwing around ideas, its probable not worth debating right now.
P.S. The only viable solution is to build such a project on top of an existing secure immutable decentralized blockchain. Like a bitcoin side-chain that is merge mined by same bitcoin miners.
There may be other solutions like using a different algorithm other than PoW that I can not think of right now.
This was my original question - How could you use existing blockchains to provide a decentralized version of twitter? The
https://memo.cash/ mentioned above does this but poorly. I will look more into this option as I agree, this is probably the best option. If I found a blockchain that is secure and cheap to send transactions, maybe I could build a website that reads all transactions in said blockchain and replicates a twitter feed using the messages in each transaction. Could even require the beginning of the message to have a specific key to remove transactions not intended to send message.
Example:
Alice sends x NMC to Bob with message saying "DECTWAT_message here"
Website displays new "tweet" (we need a better word) that is from Alice's address that may or may not be verified to read "message here"
Website does not display any transactions that did have "DECTWAT" AND were over x NMC.
Thanks again for the feedback and discussion.