It's a hard one, professional spammers can always out micro-spend regular users, just as they can out proof-of-work them.
They all earn from their spam, let's not forget. It's an industry. And a pretty lucrative one at that. So they'll always appear when the impression base is big enough, and they'll happily pay to play.
I don't get how lucrative spam is to be honest in this context.
Most spam is an entry point to some kind of either scam business or business business, not this just-for-fun semi-colon spam on bitchat. The ROI is pretty high. If you look at your spam inbox in gmail or whatever, that's what most of it is. These spammers will pay a lot to third party services to get into your proper gmail inbox, and sometimes that works.
On Farcaster, the $7 fee to create an account didn't stop the spam at all, in fact it accelerated it. Spammers were happy to pay that $7 to access a cohort of people with money on a network with native payments. So Farcaster had to deploy centralised spam-mitigation tools on top, which they can do since they control the one big client.
There's also just the advertising aspect to it, spamming becomes a pay per impression play just like any ad network. Or spammers taking money from people that don't like you to bring you down.
Nostr hasn't seem much professional spamming yet because the impression pool is way too small, just a little phishing here and there.
not true that professional spammers are not here. plenty of state actors and entities who's goal is to chase people off nostr. just because you have not seen it does not mean it is not being nefariously deployed at scale, there have been plenty of churn just due to spam (ie. it is working and we are not).
I'll buy that, it just doesn't seem to me like the kind of forever spam that sets in once the economics are right, more like "campaign based" spam of a sort.
when spam happens, the mod team just starts kicking them off, and if the payment is too low it can be dynamically adjusted until the spammer cannot afford it. ie, if the payment for a user was 7000 sats, then a spammer would have to pay 7000 sats per message. users that already signed up are unaffected. this is a game they cannot win, but only if we can find ways to expose it to the users because otherwise they won't sign up at all, get spammed, and then leave nostr.
The serious scammers might even welcome that amount, it'd keep their low-level competition away and they'd figure out some way to game it.
But even so, that'd be crippling for growth. It's just very hard to get Sats for most people. I suspect many Nostr regulars have had Sats for so long they've lost touch with how hard it is for a regular person in many countries to get 7,000 sats. Or even 1 sat. And if the price for keeping out spammers via this means is zero growth then it's not worth it.
Yes payments may be hard for people to make, but it is very important part of granting access if a user wishes to onboard quickly, in addition, with a hybrid relay that also allows in any source from a Web of Access (a nip05 whitelist, a score calculation, a payment), any of which can be used so there are options. It is not just a blanked, you must pay. The spam must be deterred somehow. So if a user is willing to spend the time to build their reputation in the spam ridden world of everything is free, eventually they will make it in without having to pay if they have garnered enough of a score. Or use the zaps from the engagement they've gotten to level up quicker.
There are many options, but ignoring payments as an option and trumpeting that it's bad for new users, is naive and will end up hurting us in the end. We will be exactly like any other social platform and even more full of spam because all the other platforms also charge now and are still full of spam.
they have to outspend yes, because if the moderation team is active they have to pay per pubkey, and normal users pay for just one pubkey. it is far superior to simple POW which does not work.
