I've said before that I'm not a fan of downvotes, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has shown that their benefits outweigh their harm.

The initial price rally from the slump of 6 cent Winter in '17 was correlated very nicely with the Whale Experiment (where a majority of whales agreed to not vote and others agreed to downvote any votes that were deemed to big). In my opinion the Whale Experiment was an Unequivocal success in demonstrating that downvotes are Essential to the platform and their power, views that I am sure many people hold as well because they too saw that a few whales and some downvotes could create a meaningful impact and effectively increase the average vote by 10x, giving value to Powering Up, as was first hypothesized, and the community was declaring this success long before the price did finally rally, but you don't have to take my word for it, it's all there in the chain. Seek and Ye sHaLl FiNd

If I were a whale with a lack of ethical inhibitions, I might use downvotes in a cycle where phase I would be to aggressively and visibly - with great fanfare - downvote people and chase them away in order to drive down the price of steem so I could buy low, then phase II would be to let the price drift back up in the absence of flag-wars, at which point I could sell high and repeat the process.

Because Flags are a net negative. Every flag that drives people away redistributes the rewards to others who would likely blow up in the vacuum you created. Steem Power prevails.