Would people pay though? Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to pick the person who answered

Would people pay though? Say it costs $0.75 USD to ask a noob question. The answerer receives $0.50 USD of that. The asker gets to pick the person who answered them best, and failing that, upvotes would decide whom the spoils go to. It would be easy to game such a system. Ask your question, get the answer, have a sock puppet account also post that answer, pick your sock puppet as the winner, only pay $0.25 for your question to be answered and stiff the person who actually put the work in to solve your problem. If it were upvote based, people would have multiple sock puppet accounts to upvote their sock puppet answer. Adding money into the mix makes it more difficult by a massive order of magnitude. Stack Overflow could open a paid noob question area and profit immensely from it, but a newcomer would first have to build the audience, get participation, and then introduce the payment system while working constantly to guard against sock puppets ruining the system.