The issue in this case is the target problem isn’t directly flood spam. It’s largely repetitive or generic generated events that aren’t from a direct human source. It’s like metadata events or piggy back events that don’t provide value to most users.
Discussion
Can relays not just require some POW attached to notes to accept them? As long as there is a real cost somewhere along the line, spam is disincentivized
POW has a fair chunk of pushback - however it does offer unique properties. The general preferred approach is pay-to-relay.
It’s a good point that perhaps generic messages shouldn’t be posted to dedicated public human consumption relays to begin with - but again, you can’t really control this. However, pay-to-relay could assist - but people will just pay for their bot pubkeys to relay, as it’s cheap per event in general.
A counter point is, just like advertising and tagging, as soon as it’s used for discovery, people will do whatever they get to boost/maximise their discovery for the lowest cost. Bot dedicated relays for example likely wouldn’t get as much attention or engagement.
I see kind 1 as a forever dumping ground of random events, as it will be the most supported kind by apps and get the most eyes. Our engineering challenge is to best manage that.