right now I'm fighting a chinese spammer on the damus relay, these people have no lives.

This is exactly what we are working on with @The Fishcake (nostr.build) but we still have a problem with these degenerates. The last few weeks we have an AI analyzing, we no longer have to check by hand, but the problem with these riff-raff is still there.

This is exactly why I don't do any public server stuff cause I don't want to deal with it, but I have mad respect for the devs who fight through it and do it for the community. I tried making a public blog website once, it got spammed with ads on Russian funeral services . I decided then I didn't want to.

Running AI against this shit also costs money. Indeed, uploading media should probably cost a few sats

Are uploads signed with nsecs? Maybe a web of trust scheme or reputation based rate limiting would help. npubs without a clean history or low connectivity go to the back of the review queue.