We see the Chinese and gibberish spam often on /new, why not to enforce some basic trivial approaches:

1. Signup allowed only from US IP addresses. Normal browsing just to read the site remains the same. *can be bypassed by using VPN/Tor, but will reduce most bot attempts.

2. Introduce a basic signup challenge question instead or in addition to the pesky Google re-captcha, such as: a. who was the first president? b. what is the first name of FLOTUS? c. what's the first word of the national anthem?

and so on with many variations of basic 2nd grade questions.