Should we disallow accounts with less than 100 reputation from posting links?

I've upvoted this question because I think it's a reasonable proposal, raised for a good reason, and it's worth discussing. I also waited a couple days before answering because I wanted to give the community a chance to weigh in.

However, I would not recommend imposing a link ban on low-rep accounts at this time.

Here's what guides my thinking:

1. Being blocked from posting links significantly worsens the new user experience (and let's face it, the new user experience is already the worst part of the model we use here 😅 so we have to be extra-careful to not make it any worse)

   Specifically:

   • We often ask question-posters to share links to the tutorial they're trying to follow, an example asset that's giving them trouble, or a source for some information they're quoting. Refusing links adds friction when new users are trying to share information needed to clearly understand their ask, making the first-time-asking experience even more frustrating.

   • Answers often benefit from linking to relevant documentation, sources to credit information found off-site and provide evidence to back-up assertions, or to share a more in-depth guide when a complete solution doesn't fit within a reasonable scope for an answer post. Refusing links risks turning away new users from answering questions, lowering our answer rate.

   Yes, new users under the restriction could still post the links as plain, non-clickable text and say "copy-paste that URL for reference". But then our scammer friends can just mimic that convention too, using a fake-but-plausible looking domain leading to a redirect, or a URL shortener to disguise where it actually leads. So it harms non-spamming users without really solving the problem of smuggling misleading links into fake posts.

2. Thankfully, our current spam level is low. This could change, and I'm open to reconsidering my position if it does. But at the moment, all of these disguised ad posts have been spotted, flagged, and down-voted by the community within hours of being posted, and quickly deleted/banned.

   I'm fairly obsessive engaged in checking the active feed and flags queue, and I only see one or two such posts in a week. If there are more, they're getting handled before I even see them.

   The system seems to be working as-is.

   The posts are not so well-disguised that they can survive long enough to get a profitable amount of traffic, and the volume of such posts is a long way from straining our manual moderation tools.

So, I think we have relatively little to gain from disallowing links, and I don't think it's worth the negative impact on the new user experience at this time.