The Modular Company (TMC)

I think that wherever there is a large enough monoculture of some sort there will be an automatic attraction for spammers and other miscreants to peddle their wares.

The rationale behind this is that as soon as the cost of reaching people goes down the incentive for a spammer to abuse the system will go up. So any kind of place that allows a uniform way to reach a large number of users through automated forms submission, search engine spamming or protocols (such as email) that spam is inevitable.

This is similar to the way biological systems behave with respect to pathogens, if a population is small or spread out then viruses and bacteria do not have a big chance to become active, but as soon as the density goes up or the numbers become very large the incentive is there to invest significant resources in order to be able to take over the biomass of the target species.

So, the solution to spam is a really simple one: diversity !

The success of email, instant messaging, content management systems, web communities and such will have to be matched by software that makes sure that each interaction with the end users is sufficiently unique that a spammer will have to invest too much time to reach that one user. And that would include spammers using armies of low wage employees filling out forms.