Has there been an uptick in spam votes against established questions? [closed]

Question

The last few days seem to have seen the resurgence of some old conflicts on Stack Overflow. In particular there have been attempts to delete some old and popular but non-technical questions(*) and a resurgence of interest in closing and deleting "Hidden Features" questions.(+)

Personally I suspect that both these efforts are doomed. Alas.

However, I also see a number of spam votes (10k+ rep only) against questions which though not good SO material are not clearly spam. This feels to me like an attempt to make an end run around the new delete requirements and/or the broad community consensus. As much as I'd like to see there abominations scrubbed from the rolls, I don't think that this is the way to go about it: it risks breaking the unusually genial culture of the site.

Is not a new phenomena? Is it not a problem because there isn't any follow up? Is it acceptable or does it need to stop? Is is a problem the team need to react to? Is it a sign that we should rethink some of the recent rule changes?

(*) _{Attempts made effectively impossible by the new delete count requirement, which I find to be a bug in the new system.}
(+) _{Which I may be partially responsible for and certainly agree with and have participated in.}

Answer 1

Please do not cast spam / offensive votes against posts unless you honestly believe them to be spam or offensive.

And by "spam" I mean it in the strict traditional internet definition not as shorthand for "I don't like this post."

If we see a pattern of this sort of behavior from users, we will consider it abuse.