Nice strawman.
Sense 1 and Sense 2 can't be reliably distinguished from the outside.
As it stands, hyporational's challenge here seems like a fully general objection to anyone ever complaining about any alleged abuse that isn't trivial to verify.
It isn't. It's an objection against naming people without providing reliable evidence. Complain all you wish for all I care, but if you wish to handle the situation, do it by changing the system, not by taking justice in your own hands.
Sense 1 and Sense 2 can't be reliably distinguished from the outside.
I disagree. There may be specific cases where they are difficult to distinguish, but I think in general it is not so hard to reliably distinguish them. In this particular case, based on the model I've formed of ialdabaoth from reading a number of his comments, based on the specific arguments he has offered, and based on what others are saying, I'd assign sense 1 a considerably higher probability than sense 2, and I'm quite confident in this distinction. I would be very surprised if it ...
I'm just tired of the signal pollution, and would like to be able to use karma to honestly appraise the worth of my articles and posts, without seeing 80% of my downvotes come in chunks that correspond precisely to how many posts I've made since the last massive downvote spree.
EDIT to add data points:
Spurious downvoting stopped soon after I named a particular individual (not ALL downvoting stopped, but the downvotes I got all seemed on-the-level.)
One block of potentially spurious downvoting occurred approximately one week ago, but then karma patterns returned to expected levels. I consider this block dubious, because it reasonably matches what I'd expect to see if someone noticed several of my posts together and disagreed with all of them, and did not match the usual pattern of starting with the earliest or latest post that I had made and downvoting everything (it downvoted all posts in a few threads, but not in other threads), so I'm just adding for completeness.
Spurious, indiscriminate downvoting started up again approximately half an hour ago on Sunday (12/1/2013), around noon MDT.
Edit: And now on Tuesday, 12/3/2013, at 10 AM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 30 points so far.
Edit: And now on Saturday, 12/14/2013, at 2 PM, I'm watching my karma go down again... about 15 points so far, at a rate of about 1-2 points per second.