A number of forums ran into problems with spam at various points. Usenet particularly had problems with it. I rarely see it today, at least not in an obvious form. I think that the decline is in part due to something that many users here often complain about — the centralization of social media. When there were many small sites dedicated to, say, bass fishing or golfing or whatever, admins had limited resources. But on Facebook or Reddit or whatnot, the anti-spam resources are basically pooled at the site level. Also, the site admins have visibility into activity spanning the entire site. Instead of writing a bot to spam, say, forum system X and then hitting each of many different sites using that forum software, one has to spam many different subreddits on Reddit, say, and that’s a lot more visible to someone like the Reddit staff, who can see all of it.
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The decline of spam
A number of forums ran into problems with spam at various points. Usenet particularly had problems with it. I rarely see it today, at least not in an obvious form. I think that the decline is in part due to something that many users here often complain about — the centralization of social media. When there were many small sites dedicated to, say, bass fishing or golfing or whatever, admins had limited resources. But on Facebook or Reddit or whatnot, the anti-spam resources are basically pooled at the site level. Also, the site admins have visibility into activity spanning the entire site. Instead of writing a bot to spam, say, forum system X and then hitting each of many different sites using that forum software, one has to spam many different subreddits on Reddit, say, and that’s a lot more visible to someone like the Reddit staff, who can see all of it.