hosting a paid relay generally makes up for the cost you have to pay for hardware, electricity and administration. nostr.wine offers a special filter/broadcast relay, that saves you internet traffic by accumulating data from several other relays and removes spam in the process.

From what I've heard it's mostly not worth it yet. But I'm pretty sure that Spambots could pretty damn easily destroy a nice UX on nostr.

They only have to be activated. Most public relays do not run specialised spam protections...

Look at what happened on 1st of January, "happy new year" bots were all over the place... All of them freshly generated and new npubs.

https://primal.net/e/note1ydvahfjhg2f7wpqax0jysultmjcqphv90kq9p7rsc25njje7qrlsxyrjmv

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But I mean you need to personally follow all these bots to even see them. Or follow a hashtag they use to see them.

You only need to follow someone to see the "original notes". You will see all the comments to these original notes, no matter who wrote the comment notes. You can block them, sure. But spammers can create a new npub in a split second.

Yes this seems to be a problem that can and probably will come up.