I tag shit as #spam. It's probably 99% of the tagging I do. As a consequence, it's a solution that works for me. I also block spammers. As a consequence, I see spam domains once. I'm not asking anyone to do shit for me - I'm doing it all by myself. Sorta follows, then, that I'm not seeing any problem. But since my method is unpopular, it also follows that nobody knows about it because when in doubt, force a system change to accommodate your needs, right?

mk and I have been around and around on this about eighty gajillion times. The fundamental problem is that he doesn't value tags, therefore he sees no solutions in tags or their taxonomy. Thus, the general idea that "spam" has to be dealt with by dealing with the users who promote spam, rather than stuff that is tagged as spam.

The problem is that anything other than sharing is seen by the posse as on/off. yes spam, no spam. yes thistag, no thistag. It's the same problem with tags - if it's #writing, it's different from #writebetterdammit and there's no mechanism for showing a subscriber of #writing anything in #writebetterdammit unless she hard follows it. On the other hand, if we had numerical affinity rather than binary, if ten people saw the link and seven people tagged it #spam, anybody filtering #spam with a threshold over three wouldn't see the link. But we don't have that implemented and we probably never will because tags have cooties and are an affront to a thinking person's web or something.

So odds are, you whingeing about spam is going to cause mk and forwardslash and rob05c to go through and edit out the spammers (again... for the nth time...) because they want people to be happy, whereas me pointing out that the problem is entirely fucking solved through tagging is going to fall on deaf ears.

It just pisses me off. This shit is easy and you don't need to make anybody do anything for you. But top down, nobody wants to talk about it because it violates the sacrosanct pact of the user-follow.