Downvoting for no reason or in a retaliatory way against a third party is a madness that will ultimately ruin Hive regardless of who is doing it. Honestly, it is not so important except when the downvote is so big as to cancel out a large portion of the author's rewards.
I wonder whether anything can be done about it. Just because it was written into Steem one way upon inception, can we not innovate a better way? We are no longer Steem and we are NOT "crabs in a bucket" as the Steem whitepaper insultingly posited.