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.
Admins cannot determine the motive, which is crucial for distinguishing the 'vandalism' case from the 'I think everything this user writes is bad and I want less of it'. The latter is aggressive but a necessary part of voting. Some users are simply lower quality than others. This should not be construed as a verdict as to the quality of user:ialdabaoth's contributions.
What admins (or for that matter automated software) could do is to publish the information. This can be done without determining motives. I'm thinking, e.g., that if user A mass-downvotes user B (according to some heuristic whose details are important but I'm not going to try to nail down here) then (1) when you go to the user page of A or B, that information is listed near their karma score, and maybe (2) when you hover over user B's karma score on any page, it indicates the fact. ("Mass-downvoted by Dias, gjm, and 6 others" or something.)
In tha... (read more)