RE: 5 times downvoted, so far no reason why (a proposal for the STEEM developers at the bottom of the post)
I wouldn't worry too much about it dude. If I had to guess, I'd think it's some kind of "bot ring" rather than a "downvote trail". I think w/ a downvote trail, you'd get hit with 20~30 small-ish downvotes.. something that would add up to something significant.
They always seem to come from accounts that have some kind of foreign-sounding 3-syllable name, and are only worth what little SP the main Steemit-Inc faucet has temporarily delegated to them.
I would imagine that all that it is, is whatever few accounts manage to make it through whatever "fraud detection" steemit-inc has for their "new account SP delegation" system -- until they get discovered, have their SP delegation removed, and are no longer able to transact on the blockchain due to limited resources.
I see these accounts all the time, but they're always very similar and I never seem to see them for long, which makes me think that they're getting blacklisted.
@andrarchy and/or some of the @steemitblog might be able to comment on my speculation.
EDIT:
After looking at a couple of the accounts, a few of them are directly powering up their rewards to @camillesteemer:
So yeah, I'd say it looks like a bot ring that's taking advantage of the steemit faucet, and powering up directly to @camillesteemer when they hit a certain threshold of rewards earned that's set in some kind of script.
I'm not worry about these little accounts, despite I think it is a behavior that bigger ones can also replicate.
The thing is that the downvote operation can be easily addressed to avoid this kind of use. I am not against downvotes, I think it has been a perfect tool to fix some of the historical problems here but it can be improved, for sure.
You have to have a reason to downvote someones post, if not it is just a malfunction and another abuse of the code.
I think that if you end up programming something into the blockchain that is intended to prevent or slowdown downvote abuse, it'll be easily overcome by someone that programs some form of script.
i.e. -- just sending a comment justifying the downvote decision.
It's part of the reality with how the steem blockchain is constructed, and how it's made open to everyone.
The best thing we can do is form official or unofficial communities and groups that know how to determine real abusers and prevent large bot rings like this in succeeding.
Long story short, best thing you can do is flag 'em -- and let people know to turn off the faucet. I don't think "new rules" are what we need. Rather, just more of a "see something, say something" kind of mentality.
But if you set a Captcha to perform the operation you may cut the automated downvote ring.
I don't know if coding a captcha onto the blockchain-level interactions is possible.
Sure -- you could have a captcha on frontends like Steemit or Steempeak -- but all that would realistically do is stop real users that are (hopefully) acting fairly and casting justified downvotes.