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 community norm against such actions? About whether such actions are generally highly toxic to the LW community?
our community's attempt at playing Inquisition?
A brief perspective check: The Inquisition tortured people and had them executed for heresy. What has happened here is that someone said "I think so-and-so probably did something unpleasant".
You're already participating, naming a possible culprit
It is possible that you have misunderstood what I said -- which is not that I think Eugine did what ialdabaoth says he probably did (I do have an opinion as to how likely that is, but have not mentioned it anywhere in this discussion).
What I said is that if it comes to be believed that Eugine acted as ialdabaoth says he thinks he probably did, then that may lead LW participants to shy away from expressing opinions that they think Eugine will dislike. This can happen even if Eugine is wholly innocent.
mentioning a possible culprit who broke a non-existing rule in the same comment that calls for public shamings.
This seems rather tenuous to me. I did not accuse him of anything, nor did I call for him to be shamed. (Still less for anything to be done to him that would warrant the parallel with the Inquisition.)
There could be consensus that it's harmful without consensus that there should be a rule against it.
Making the rules against all harmful things is a FAI-complete problem. If someone is able to do that, they would better spend their time writing the rules in a programming language and creating a Friendly AI.
Let's assume we have a rule "it is forbidden to downvote all posts by someone, we detect such behavior automatically by a script, and the punishment is X". What will most likely happen?
a) The mass downvoters will switch to downvoting all com...
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.