It's not about who's the "accusing party", it's about limiting potential damage. It would have cost you only a few seconds to edit in order to rot13 or remove something you were told was spoiler -- an action which would have been of positive utility to us, of hardly any cost to you -- instead you preferred to spend a hundredfold times that amount of time in a negative-sum game, where we lose because the damn spoiler is still up, and you lose by losing all your karma, and we ALL lose by wasting time debating this back and forth.

Why don't we instead trade utilities, you by editing to remove/rot13 the spoiler, and I by removing my own downvotes of you? As could have been done from the very first post?

A post only needs a score of -1 to be hidden.

By default, posts with -2 or less are hidden. (I just created a new account to check). I'm pretty sure the default used to be -4.

The post currently stands at -12 points, in addition to ongoing punitive serial-downvoting of his (and my) further posts on the issue (most of which both did not mention the spoiler and were hidden under the hidden post).

That is not relevant to anything I said. People can downvote for whatever reason they want, and should generally do so to mean "I want to see fewer comments like this one".

I find escalation of conflict fun after it reaches a point where I cannot possibly win. I'm very popular with authority, as you could probably guess.

I would also guess that many of your peers don't much care for the escalation of conflict for its own sake, either.

When I started here I went back and changed posts, hoping that downvotes would be replaced with upvotes. There was little reaction and I think it really wasn't worth the time.

Near as I can tell, the easiest way to get your karma back is to make a top level post repeating what other people are already saying in storytelling way. That may fall out of fashion at some point, though, so don't over invest your time in developing your storytelling and other people repeating skills, or whatever.

I wouldn't have predicted that you (presumably) and thomblake make a habit of monitoring posts you downvote for changes,

We were still in the discussion thread. I don't promise to stick around indefinitely, but he would have obviously chosen to mention he has now fixed it, same way that he chose to complain instead.

I didn't mean to say you were suggesting particular rules.

If a thing is unfair, then it is not following the rules. It does sound like you believe or believed that there were some rules that should have been followed, but were not.

Your hypothetical rules might have been reasonable. If my vague speculation about roughly what those rule might have been is close, then there isn't a means in place on this board to enforce rules like that.