Is there any way we, as users, can help deal with the waves of spam-meds-bots? When I get the chance I downvote, but that’s not possible for microblog. Do reporting them have any effect, or they go in the pile and are more a nuisance than a help?
If we blocked the culprit users, would it do anything other than us personally, even by just reducing their visibility?
The problem I see (and what influenced the tone of my other comment) is that I don’t think I’ve seen any acknowledgement about any sort of filtering and this is a persistent problem. I get it, but also it seems really unnecessary to manually remove the 10 threads obviously not made by humans (or even just the 3 accounts that just popped up in a close time-frame).
It doesn’t need to be perfect, surely any technique can be worked-around eventually but that also introduces extra steps (that spammers don’t need to take now) that makes it harder and less likely. Doing so I think makes moderation much more viable and impactful.
Even just some sort of auto-spoiler/warning (multiple suspicious keywords in a non-relevant community, new user, 3 threads in an hour etc) could have an effect.