In the last few weeks there has been a new phonemenon on Steem. Several small acounts using steemit delegation to auto-downvote post after post after post. They have low steem power and always almost super low voting power because they down-vote so much. So financially the effect is almost nothing. That said it is kind of entertaining to see how pissed off people get.
Personally I've been down-voted by these bots 3 times in only a few days. Before this week nothing like this had ever happened on my account. Same thing happened to my brother @closetCanada shortly before that.
The timing is very interesting given Jerry Banfield created a controversy over this topic less than a month ago. He cited the psychological negative effect of a down-vote.
Most of the big whales in the community were completely against it and down-voted him into oblivion. At the time I was supporting him on this, though I've since come to change my mind. His video did have some good points, and the fact that everyone was against him made me want to support the underdog.
I thought about it some more and I think we do need some balance when it comes to bad content on the site that could potentially rise to the top via voting bots. For example a obvious scams which could end up on the front page and cause people harm. I'm not exactly sure how the system should work anymore.
That said it seems someone out there got pissed off with the whole controversy and has decided to spread some chaos throughout the community.