Abuse of the LW karma system is damaging to the whole community and everyone benefits if such abuse results in public shaming.
Note there's not even a consensus whether there should be a rule against such usage. What you find to be 'abuse' others may find to be valid expressions within the system of wanting someone to 'go away'. No details, no demarcation line, but calling for 'public shaming'? Please.
Before you say "well it's implicitly clear!", consider 1) suffering from a typical mind fallacy and 2) the precedent that there even was an explicit post about not recommending violence against actual people on LW (so much for 'implicitly clear').
Lastly, don't counter jerks by advocating being a jerk. "Benefits" and "public shaming" ... don't get me started. What's this, our community's attempt at playing Inquisition? Can't we skip those stages? You're already participating, mentioning a possible culprit who broke a non-existing rule in the same comment that calls for public shamings.
In that vein, hey gjm, I heard you stopped beating your wife? Good for you!
there's not even a consensus whether there should be a rule against such usage.
There could be consensus that it's harmful without consensus that there should be a rule against it. (I have no idea whether there is.) After all, LW gets by fairly well with few explicit rules. In any case, all that's relevant here is that ialdabaoth might reasonably hold that such behaviour is toxic and should be shamed since the question was whether his actions have credible reasons other than a personal grudge.
Was there ever a similar poll about whether there should be a ...
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.