I've gotten sufficient evidence from support that voiceofra has been doing retributive downvoting. I've banned them without prior notice because I'm not giving them more chances to downvote.
I'm thinking of something like not letting anyone give more than 5 downvotes/week for content which is more than a month old. The numbers and the time period are tentative-- this isn't my ideal rule. This is probably technically possible. However, my impression is that highly specific rules like that are an invitation to gaming the rules.
I would rather just make spiteful down-voting impossible (or maybe make it expensive) rather than trying to find out who's doing it. Admittedly, putting up barriers to downvoting for past comments doesn't solve the problem of people who down-vote everything, but at least people who downvote current material are easier to notice.
Any thoughts about technical solutions to excessive down-voting of past material?
People holding similar positions to yours but expressing them in much less dickish ways have included, off the top of my head, Konkvistador (whose total karma is 88% positive), nydwracu (91% positive), Vladimir M (93% positive). Nyan Sandwich and Moss Piglet appear to have deleted their accounts, but I don't recall them being downvoted much either -- nor can I recall many people lamenting the presence of any of said commenters.
For comparison, advancedatheist is 59% positive and sam0345 (most likely James Donald) is 53% positive; also eridu, who expressed radical feminist opinions in a way almost as obnoxious as Jim expresses his, has since deleted his account, but IIRC his % positive was also in the mid 50s.
So no, the social acceptability of a statement does not just depend on its factual content.
This may sound like an intricate Song of Ice and Fire fan theory, but has anybody checked whether eugine_nier and Jim Donald are the same person? For example, can we compare the IP of sam0345 and Eugine's accounts? Alternatively, Yvain probably has access to the IP address for both posters.
(I am not the same username2 as above. This is my first post using the anonymous username2 account)