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Probably; but I do think you need to consider abuse in the early stage of many things, or respond to changes in circumstances (as is happening here). A naïve system design is often open to rampant abuse, and even a small number of abusers can seriously mess things up. How many people are actually sending out spam? Not all that many, on the internet scale of things. If you're not careful a very tiny minority – potentially even a single person – can completely destroy any good system that doesn't anticipate and respond to abuse.

But like with many things, it's indeed a trade-off.

Remember that Digital Ocean hacktober fest a few years ago that caused endless pointless spam to many repositories? The following year they instituted some fairly simple changes which mostly eliminated it. Sometimes even simple changes can be quite effective.

It remains to be seen what the long-term effects are; perhaps once the novelty wears off things will settle down. I bet that at least some of these submissions are people trying to see how far they can get, just for "fun", like a kid with a new toy. Give a boy a hammer and he will discover that everything needs hammering. I have no idea if that's 1%, 10%, or 50%.

Some others are "inspired" by those YouTube ... people ... similar to what happened with hacktoberfest, and that will die down too as those YouTube ... people ... tend to hook in to anything new as a way to sell their nonsense, and this will probably die down. I have no idea what exactly their effect is either.

In short, it's probably too soon to panic just yet; let's check again in a year or so. Maybe things will be better, or maybe not and we'll be stuck with even more poo-poo flung our way by the internet monkeys.




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