Okay, Twitter, this is just getting ridiculous:

Not content with single friend/follow notifications, Twitter spammers are removing and re-adding and following and un-following people so as to be able to send more notifications. Yes, yes, I know about the block feature, but that’s like the whack-a-mole routine of maintaining an IP deny blacklist on one’s own site — a reactive measure which just hides the spam from individual users’ notice, doing nothing to censure or discourage serial Twitter “followers.” I don’t want to turn off notifications or limit people’s ability to follow my Twitter stream; I just want to deincentivize disincentivize those who mass-add Twitter contacts for no reason other than to fill inboxes and follower lists with self-promotion. A block-list does not send them the message that such behavior is unacceptable.

Update: Twitter has updated their contacts system by merging the “friend” and “follow” functions, but this does not address the spam issue. Twitter is still not doing enough to deter this kind of behavior, and make it not pay off. Look at this flood of follow notifications from a link spammer using multiple Twitter accounts to push links to a dubious online toy store: