Power would concentrate in the hands of the few who have time to plow through every relevant comment in case they come across a user or an opinion that might violate their preferences.
Or it would diffuse among the many who vote according to their preferences on whatever comments they happen to notice.
Do you have good reasons to expect these kinds of users would protect your preferences?
Nope, in either case. I doubt my preferences align particularly well with the "coherent volition" of LW as a whole.
If what you're advocating becomes the norm, how is a user supposed to know why he was downvoted/upvoted and change/continue their behaviour?
I agree that this is a problem.
If silence becomes the norm, this problem is not ameliorated.
Downvotes and upvotes are in general a poor mechanism for communicating that sort of detailed information, they just provide a sense over time a sense of what kinds of things get downvoted... more by looking at the downvoting of other users than by looking at the downvoting of our own comments, in practice, because there are so many more other users than there are usses.
But they're what we have, and they are better than silence.
Even with the current voting volume, few explanations for votes are given.
True.
Or it would diffuse among the many who vote according to their preferences on whatever comments they happen to notice.
I doubt that. Many people here have long comment histories. You don't simply happen to notice most old comments, but if you're so inclined and have the time, clickfest awaits.
If silence becomes the norm, this problem is not ameliorated.
Silence already is the norm. "By the way I downvoted all your comments because of X." How do you expect that to go?
What amount of bad comments would be a reasonable threshold for downvoting someone's every comment? 50 percent? 20 percent? Should there be guidelines for that?
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.