This isn't about members self promoting, this is about actual spam and link building bots.
The other day I went into a post and like 10 minutes after being posted it had 4 comments that did not look organic (with external links to BS), and the post also had 8 upvotes, which, given how low quality it was, did not seem organic. Does IH have any vote fraud detection system in place?
Another thing I've seen is posts by other members repurposed for spam in other threads.
here is an example if a bad bot posting the repurposed comment originally by Tiago in the same thread, making it too obvious that it's a bot:

I don't now how to fix this or what goals IH has. My first thought was to just put registration behind a $20 one-time fee, but it's not inclusive to do so.
Other comunities I'm a part of although free, have had a video-interview process to join, not sure if this is something that scales to IH size.
For real. I've seen this too. I don't mind someone linking to their own project in comment (i've done it), but the bot stuff is what will kill the community utility.
I'm all for a paywall.
I'm for a paywall
Captcha