Of anyone except Google and its users, you mean; and also other search engines using some other ranking algorithm that considers inbound links.

I am well aware of the quantity-not-quality maxim etched into a spammer's brain. However:

• The proposition that adding a link costs the spammer nothing (presented in one of the articles you linked to) is false. There are several kinds of costs involved in posting a link. These include figuring out what forum software this is and how to post to it, as well as actually making the post. Signing in to many sites *is not* easy; it's probably the most expensive step. Admins can suspend accounts used for spamming (and easily delete all their posts), so it's less attractive for the spammer to use the same account for many posts.
  
  
• The value of a spam comment *is* different for the spammer depending on whether this link is nofollow or not. Not convinced? Google for nofollow and you'll see someone actually advertising for a product/service that alerts advertisers about "cheaters" who carry their ads but add nofollow to them. (This may be a ploy by Google, but that's just a little too conspiracy-theory for me.)

The idea isn't to stop spam by making it impossible. Like hashcash, and indeed most any technological mechanism against spam, the idea is to make it somewhat less profitable (while not significantly increasing the costs for regular users). One result is that more sites will have an indirect incentive to add prove-you're-a-human measures, which is not a bad thing, even if the state of the art in that field isn't perfect.

This tech is easy to implement and make use of, so it has a chance of being adopted widely by software used to post comments.

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