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.
OK. So, we've identified a few implicit assumptions here.
Being concerned about middle-school-level status games is contemptible; it's just plain silly to think it matters.
It is highly unlikely that anyone is both motivated by total karma and unconcerned if their karma is reduced significantly by capricious acts of rogue agents.
More generally, it is senseless to both treat karma score as evidence of the worth of someone's contributions and not to care if some people's karma is reduced significantly by capricious acts of rogue agents.
Have I mischaracterized any of these?
For my own part, I think #3 is false, #2 might be true but ought not be, and #1 is both false and so pernicious as to be actively harmful to real people in the world.
On #1: I think calling something "middle-school-level" is, when applied to something done by intelligent adults, itself a term of contempt. I would not use that term to describe something I thought worth caring about. (I remark for clarity that it wasn't I who used the term to describe concerns about karma.)
On #2: I agree that an ideal reasoner could have both those properties but am fairly sure that very few real human beings (even in the rather unusual LW population) do, whence my remark about halfway-normal human beings.
On #3: "Senseless&... (read more)