[rajanaccros]

As far as I know moderators are not responsible for most of the spam that comes through. As you said it can be plentiful. I have been caught in spam (other) filters many times just for using tor browser (thanks HN!). We already have spam filters available with spam trends that are pretty discernable that can do the bulk of the work.

There are other ways to make this work through some heuristic that auto identifies a comment and starts it below a visible threshold. What spammers are not good at, is spending time to go edit comments and content to evade these filters.

My point is that moderation is extremely limited. Review illegal content flagged comments, check appeals for false positives of a spam filter. All other content should it make it in the thread can be moderated by the community.