Backlink farms are driving me f***ing nuts!

I woke up this morning to an email from a user asking me if I'd seen the discover feed on my blogging platform (https://bearblog.dev). I checked it out and it was full of trash backlink farming antics. There was everything from renting a delorean to ED pills.

This is bad news for my platform as this kind of activity has the potential to reduce the domain authority of Bear, as well as (if things got bad) have us marked as a spam site. It makes me so angry that when you make something nice, and free, the internet just gives you a big middle finger.

I've since cleaned out all the trash, but now have to figure out how to prevent this from happening. The first step is adding bot protection (which is simple enough). What I noticed though, is that these fake accounts were set up by human actors working at a backlink farm. This makes it a lot harder to prevent.

For the next few days/weeks I will be moderating the blogs that are launched. This isn't a long-term solution though. The other solution is for your account to be approved by a moderator, but this is also kinda shit as it impedes the user flow. A third option is making all links no-follow, so that they can't be used for backlink farming, but they can still spam my discover feed with "Make money working from home" posts.

Has anyone had issues like this before? Can anyone suggest some solutions for me?