Indeed they can't, but they are still different things; it's reasonable to have different attitudes towards #1 becoming a community norm and towards #2 becoming a community norm; and what encourages #1 and what encourages #2 might be different.

Encouraging #1 unavoidably encourages #2 too, because it provides plausible deniability. I have no idea how bad it could get.

You're right -- I should have said "complaining and providing names". Sorry about that. I shall edit my comment to clarify.

This is what I meant by the strawman, thanks for catching it.

What do you think anyone concerned can actually, realistically, do to change the system?

Take all the people who complain about abuse, and brainstorm what a good system would be like. Make a post about the proposed solutions and have lw people vote. Find a programmer who can do it for free, or pay for one. Ask permission from an admin.

I proposed a solution in an open thread, but can't find it. The idea was that most mass downvoting happens within a short time period in an angry mood, so limiting the amount of votes one can give within a time period to a particular person could be a solution. People seemed to like it based on the upvotes. It might not work for this particular situation we have here, though, but would at least make mass downvoting a nuisance for the culprit.

I'm not sure what the reddit platform allows for.