as this continues, my estimate for how likely it is that Eugine was actually behind this has gone up from around 10% to around 50%,
That's interesting. Do you think it's true generally for some user X that, if I were to assert a belief that X was "behind this" and X did not respond, their lack of response would provide you with that much of a certainty-bump? Or is this unique to Eugine?
FWIW, were someone on LW to publicly assert their belief that I was covertly engaging in locally-disapproved-of behavior, I expect my response would be some version of "Interesting. Why do you believe that?" without confirming or denying it, and I doubt greatly that I would make my votes public in response.
Admittedly, were someone to PM me asking if I was doing that and if so why, I would probably answer honestly.
The certainty bump is a function of a variety of different aspects of the lack of response, including the fact that he didn't even say something like what you suggest about ""Interesting. Why do you believe that? And that he's not responded even as this thread has grown, and he didn't respond to either PMs (apparently) or the first public call out.
There's also an aspect of personalities that is relevant here. Frankly, I'd expect you to say something like your suggested response whether or not you were actually engaging in the behavior in questio...
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.