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?
Blocking is a personal thing, there’s no heuristic that determines if a specific user is blocked by x people to automatically block them for users. That would be quite appealing though, but the abuse potential is quite significant, if you have a bot army…
Reporting will notify the moderator(s) of the community, so if and how fast they react really depends on them.