I have noticed this rather pervasive problem getting worse, over the past month or so. And I fear it's not likely to go away.

"Freedom" is all good and fine, but what do end users WANT? I remember being on the forefront of this many years ago with Google. Google had to address the fact that having no controls meant they were unable to provide a positive search experience for users. You'd search for, let's say, "growing oranges" and people out there had found ways to spam search results to such a degree that none of the first 30-50 results would actually return information on "growing oranges." Instead, you'd end up on these endless "aggregator sites" where there's be 300 links to web sites that were all AD's for growing oranges, but no actual information about oranges.

Again, freedom is all good and fine, but it invariably means you end up with "bad" users supplanting "good," unless you're willing to take away the "bad" users' freedoms. Which suggests determining the objectives of the spammers, and then making those objectives either very costly or impossible to reach.

Of course, that doesn't rule out plain stupidity, vengeance motives and mental illness (trolls).

No easy answers, sadly.