> Does it really matter if the spam quality gets better?
It matters a lot. Spam is easy to recognize and e.g. my current email client filters out dozens to hundreds of spam mails per day without any false positives. If you cannot distinguish spam from normal posts, this could even cause democracy to break. Unfortunately, there are strong anti-democratic forces in the world who want this to happen. In my humble opinion, this is the biggest threat to humanity right now because (unlike other threats) it's not hypothetical, it's going to happen.
>If you cannot distinguish spam from normal posts, this could even cause democracy to break.
You can distinguish however online accounts from real people and bots. That's easy and so cheap, i consider it it, essentially free. Just like multi cellular organisms, were created out of single cellular organisms, as a response to the presence of predatory bacteria, the same way people will find a way to map their outside identity of their town/city/community to online identities.
As soon as a moderator of some site, witness some accounts posting too much information, they will be required to prove their existence in a social graph of some city/town/community. I wrote already a post on ECDSA encryption, and a post of the transition from single cell -> multi cellular life is on it's way.
As if there is any democracy in the countries that claim to have democracy. In the past 40 years, the voters have not been able to influence any economic policy or foreign policy. 74% Americans said to Gallup that they thought their votes absolutely did not change anything and they did not matter even as early as the second Bush administration...
It matters a lot. Spam is easy to recognize and e.g. my current email client filters out dozens to hundreds of spam mails per day without any false positives. If you cannot distinguish spam from normal posts, this could even cause democracy to break. Unfortunately, there are strong anti-democratic forces in the world who want this to happen. In my humble opinion, this is the biggest threat to humanity right now because (unlike other threats) it's not hypothetical, it's going to happen.