You can win speakers so it's not terrible, I don't even mind the concept of paying to speak, I think we could do with less people able to mouth off all the time, but what I think is out of whack is the price to speak.
The price is currently $0.30 USD for every line you speak, which is something mildly atrocious. Considering how most people type on the internet this:

"he said that?"
"yeah"
"lol"

Would cost someone roughly $1USD. That's the kind of pricing one might have expected of an SMS text conversation in the early 90s, but we're quickly running up on 2010 here, there's no way that's a realistic pricing guide.