Im aware of that and dont have a solution for that. Its not my job to provide one. The thing is there doesnt need to be one if you just document your stuff in a normal way. Also other platforms like reddit face the same problem and seem to be able to solve it in another way, so its not mandatory to survive in the net. Spam has always been an issue as long as the public internet existed. There are other ways to deal with it than introducing global identifiers which can be correlated between platforms and the "real world".
Reddit solves it by having millions of unpaid human moderators manually removing spam. And also by throttling/shadowbanning accounts that use anonymous IPs, non-FAANG email accounts, or non-google/apple SSO.
That's shortsighted. GP doesn't want to share their phone number, because then that phone number is likely to be sold together with their other data which can lead to more nasty problems.
That's not the only alternative. You see these kinds of intrusive checks on platforms that have drastically under-funded moderation/safety teams. I don't know Discord's numbers, but Twitter's total revenue pre-Musk was about $1/user/month or about $0.01/tweet. Plus there's a hunger for investor-beloved growth metrics that leaves things biased toward greasing the signup funnels. So you end up with privacy-destroying compromises like this.
The solution would be easy: at least offer an alternative. I would gladly give you a few cents or a dollar so you leave me alone with the dishonest bullshit. Probably one of the easiest and most effective ways you could use to fight spammers, but it is obvious why nobody does it or offers the option, because they want numbers. Would be nice to at least stop the charade.
In short, no, the alternative is not "being overrun by spam".
Right, but that's "support", not "documentation". Completely different thing, and the latter is not really a substitute for the former, whether it's on Discord, IRC, XMPP, or at the bar after a conference.
What's your solution?