I can't speak for others, but I can speak for myself. I did not downvote these comments in the past, before HF21, but since the last hardfork, I can't really upvote comments anymore and I don't want these comments from "tts" to be above any of the other comments I might get.

Also, I have never heard anyone telling me that they are using this, and if I would want to offer my articles in text-to-speech format, I could easily make them myself.

Not sure what the reason for others downvotes are though.