Most people will immediately flip out if there is a downvote regardless the amount or reason.
I don't know if it's "most" people, but a lot of people do, and I think the reason is because they value their own content more than everyone else does. Instead of seeing it as an object lesson, they see it as an injustice. Human nature, I guess.
Prior to me getting involved, there were multiple 100% automated posts making $100+/day. Do you feel that is fair to authors who put hours into writing their own content and make less than $1?
Life isn't fair. If this happens as a consequence of this:
The system was designed for the community to vote with both upvotes and downvotes to establish what the community feels is a fair amount.
then the community has spoken, but keep in mind that "the community" consists of whales who can upvote or downvote at 10% percent with a strength greater than a dozen plankton with an upvote or downvote of 100%. To some people, that can seem like an imbalance. I certainly believe that those who have built their reputations on the chain should have more clout. But with greater clout comes greater responsibility.
I 100% agree there are bad downvotes, but it is extremely rare and far less common than bad upvotes. I don't feel it is even remotely a epedemic. It's a problem, but extremely rare and 100% fixable with the tools already available to us.
We found something to agree on.
Not all downvotes you feel are bad are actually bad downvotes, in most cases you either don't know why they are happening, or don't want to accept it.
No one knows why anyone else is downvoting unless they ask, or the downvoter discloses it. When I downvote, which is not often, I do usually leave a comment explaining why. The exception is when something is blatantly spam or plagiarized. I've actually seen people bragging about downvoting something they thought was low-value and I do think there is a huge grey area where "low-value" content can mean a lot of things that are relative to each other. Maybe someone's English isn't that great, so their prose seems choppy and broken. Maybe they aren't great at expressing themselves in written form but have interesting ideas. "Low-value" is a relative term that can mean different things to different people.
I feel entitlement is far more of a epedemic here than these rogue downvotes you can't produce.
Entitlement is a big problem for the human face in general. Especially in the U.S.