Curiosity fell over the cliff (aka what happened here??)

Question

Once upon a time there was a user named Curiosity.

That user got fair share of questions with what appears to be fair upvotes:

Examples: one, two, three

Then came this question where a user posted a comment that might have offended our Curious user:

Good chances that he/she chose not to sit on the fence and instead revenge that other user by downvoting some of his posts:

And now for the interesting part... as you can see those downvotes came two at a time, which smells of a sock puppet. And I really don't like that smell, so I flagged and explained, expecting a merge and/or suspension if found guilty.

However, Curiosity is no more. Nuked from the face of the virtual Earth we call Stack Overflow, along with all his/her downvoted posts that got auto deleted as well.

My question is: why? Why not a suspension, even for a year if that was a real sock puppet master gaming the system?

Answer 1

We no longer merge sock puppets, as Mad Scientist states.

The main account for this user knows why their Curiosity account was deleted.

Answer 2

Real users with some positive contributions are not deleted for rule violations in most cases, suspension is usually the harshest punishment that is used. This does not extend to fake accounts that are determined to belong to the same user. Merging accounts against the will of the user is dangerous and has some significant privacy implications, which is the reason why it is not done anymore and moderators lost the ability to merge users. The easiest way to neutralize all votes and deal with sock puppets is to delete them.

So without any inside information, I'd be pretty sure that this user was determined to be the sock of another user. In this case the socks get deleted outright, and the sock master usually gets suspended. It is not uncommon that if there is one sock, there are more of them, voting on each other. I suspect you just saw one of the socks, and never saw the actual puppet master.