RE: Testing If People Read Something Before Letting Them Comment
You have indeed pointed a out a very real problem with a platform like this (any pretty much any place that allows comments), but I'm not sure the solution is that practical though I'm interested in the results from the trial run that they are trying. I can't decide on an opinion on the idea as I like some aspects and worry about others.
I personally see two ways something like that can be abused. The first option would be for the author to put subjective things in the answers and in this way filtering out comments on the basis of opinion.
The second thing that might happen is for a market for an automated way to break this type of quiz-to-comment like there is one for Captchas. A service like this could probe the possible answers from a few IPs and thus learn the correct answers and then provide them to people building algorithms leaving spammy comments. Since the bar for commenting would be higher, spammy comments might end up being more valuable to the spammer who has the technical ability to clear it.
In a way spammers and honest publishers are always going to be playing a game of cat and mouse and you also see that on steem/steemit. Spamming on a large scale is always a profitable enterprise even when the community is actively fighting against it as there are always enough gullible people to fall for it. In the case of this platform to give a generic automated comment like "I agree with you" an upvote and in the more general internet case to follow a dubious link and to possibly even to purchase a dubious product.
I don't really support it. It was an idea from what other people are doing because of issues they have. Steemit isn't big yet, but maybe in the future something like this, on a voluntary author basis, might be desired by some authors. Maybe clever people get by it anyways, but the authors might welcome a reduction in overall crap and let those who care to do a quiz get through, while maybe some spam still does.
It is an interesting concept indeed and sure worthy of exploration. Do you think there would be any way to actually build something like that into the blockchain itself, not just the interface? Like solving the quiz correctly would give you a specific posting key to allow you to post under a specific post? I'm kind of shooting in the dark since I don't really understand the underlying technology that well.
An overall reduction in spam would be welcome and it's the most one could actually hope for. You are right that the fact that we can't stop all spam doesn't make stoping some spam useless.