I don't think the proposed strategy would be a successful means of getting rewards.
And if someone does employ that strategy, and it is working, I think there are ways to mitigate it without another reward change, such as suggestions by frontends to new users to follow black lists and mute lists that lookout for abusive bot accounts.
Implementation of user chosen mute lists are coming for peakd so hopefully that helps (they do depend on people creating good lists that are also labeled well so that users understand the list and want to use it). If needed we could consider something like a statistically driven automated badge that indicates a user as a heavy repetitive commenter. Even perhaps possible to put that badge on comments. This gives an option to be made aware while not going as far as muting their experience. #ideas
The current reputation serves a similar function, but I like your idea based on spam level (although we'd have to work out useful metrics), as something like that could be a more objective indicator.
It was successful enough in the past that people did it. It costs effectively nothing to post comments, so if you get anything, even a little reward once out of 1000 comments, it's a gain. You need HP, but you can still use your HP for voting or whatever else (as long as it doesn't use too many RCs).
Or for that matter, even if it isn't quite all that successful but shows enough promise (occasional rewards), people may do it, which is still harmful. It's not something where you lose a lot of money by being wrong, you either make some or make none, but either way spam up the chain, cause annoyance on the social layer, and increase everyone else's cost for RCs.
As for the other mitigations, yes that could work, we can try that if needed.
it's true that gains are possible through this change, but let's don't forget the positive developments that could occur from this as well... engagement of users! I think it's worth a try
I don't disagree.
I agree on the other hand.
I agree on the other hand.