The correct approach is to introduce a mechanism where one nostr identity can sign a piece of data identifying and rating another (forming a web of trust). It worked for the old days of bitcoin p2p sales, and will work fine here.
Discussion
Spam is a subset of the trust problem, and a web-of-trust solves it. Also solves discoverability.
Follows are signed keys with rating +1, works well enough and it exists today.
Rating isn’t a binary, and negrating is needed.
Could just be some extra metadata in the contact list next to petname
But you might not want to follow them so yeah could be a new note type
Yeah, this is orthogonal to whether you are following. You might want to follow someone you *don’t* trust to critique their writings, for example.
And you might trust one person enough to recommend to others, and another person with your life. If commerce happens on nostr, you’ll care to know the difference.
In the OTC days we used a range of -10 to 10, where -10 was scammer/thief who will likely abscond with your money, and 10 was highest honors.