[buescher]

We could see it coming, right?, as usenet was taken over by spam and "binaries". https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html "by God I KNOW what this network is for, and you can't have it" is painful to read today. Note this is from 1998. But why would we think the web would be any different?

[VyseofArcadia]

Any form of communication intended for humans will eventually be used for spam. That should be easy to refer to as so-and-so's law, but I can't find anyone to attribute it to.

The one observation I have is that real-time communication platforms (IRC back in the day, Discord/Slack now) seem to be more resilient if only because obvious spam can be nuked by a mod right away. Of course this just means spammers have to be more subtle, we shouldn't be pretending that these platforms are spam-free.

It's the text chat equivalent of leaving a brand name soda on a table in a movie. Some, for example, game publisher can just have bots go onto Discord and talk about "hey I heard [new game] is getting pretty good reviews".