I've been lurking the site for a while, and I've noticed a disturbing amount of spam that shows up on this site. That alone isn't too worrying, Bitcoin is a new monetary system and there are a lot of people trying to take advantage of this newness to trick gullible and ill-informed people into giving them money.
The worrying part is that this spam is sticking around on the new questions page for far too long, to the point that it feels like I can't view the new questions without at least one obvious spam question getting in the way. The bit that hit me particularly bad today was the following:
[ANN][AIRDROP]⚡️⚡️Millions of TTC token airdrop⚡️⚡️
At the time of writing, this has been up, viewable, and on the New Questions list for 7+ hours. Counting my spam close flag, the comment's assumed spam close flag, and the downvotes, we have at least eight people that saw this question, knew it was a bad question, but didn't bother to flag it.
While this specific instance is pretty egregious just because of the obviousness of the spam and the sheer amount of time it's been up, I usually expect to see at least a couple spam questions every morning. By consequence, new Bitcoin users would get exposed to these links as well, from a site that superficially borrows a ton of clout from the Stack Exchange network. We are not Quora or Yahoo Answers. People trust us.
If we want this Exchange site succeed, we need to do better. There's the obvious suggestions: if you see spam, flag it. Flag corner cases and dumb product recommendations more readily. But I assume people already know that. Is there additional work that can be done to protect the site against spam?