Your suggestions seem reasonable... if it gets to the point of an all-out War On Spam-bots. Unless things get that bad, it may be sufficient simply to make it a little more difficult for the spammers (so that they go hit on other sites). Meanwhile, I doubt that many spammers are going to go to trouble to create the mutually-supportive accounts (and certainly not actually spending money by hiring live users).
About hiring live users... it will be a slave hiring, without paying money.
Here is how it works, just one of these 2 options:
1- Spammers automatically create a blog, crawl the submitted articles here to their blog, and wait for a real user to comment on it, and then submit that comment here.
Or: 2- Spammers would create a bot that crawls the submitted article, submit that article to any public social news website, and wait for real users' comments, and then automatically submit the real users' comments here, and you will think it is NOT a bot/spam, but it is.
EDIT: This is something that can be implemented these days, not after a decade!
If this happens, will you think that this is a bot or not?
