Oh, don't get me wrong - these threads are still spam fests and probably should be locked. But if you look at some of the most recent posts in those threads (Examples: #1, #2, #3), people are at least reading what is written and are responding to each other.

Now if you look at a page from a spam mega thread in Bitcoin Discussion such as this one, every post is a one or two line, meaningless, sometimes barely even English, shitpost. There is no back-and-forth between users, and you can absolutely guarantee nobody is reading the posts that are made.

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Totally, but even a single dedicated mod for Bitcoin Discussion and Altcoin Discussion (which is where I assume most of the reports come from, although I don't know this), would free up a lot of time for hilarious and other higher mods.

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I think if they don't get paid a couple of times most of them will just spam harder or in different boards.

I regularly report spam mega threads and they always get locked or trashed. I don't think the issue here is the mods not trusting us. I think simply having a dedicated board mod who would monitor threads and regularly lock or trash then before they become spam mega threads would be a big step forward.