Ah yes, the obligatory "mosquito downvoters."

My husband knows more about this than I do, but it seems it all dates back to sometime in early 2018 where there were some "whale wars" and one particular person got really angry at not being free to engage in a particular type of toxic bot behavior — something to do with "reward pool rape" as I recall — and retaliated by creating literally thousands of accounts and using the initial 15SP Steemit delegation to put downvotes everywhere.

As I understood, it's all completely automated. The three witnesses voted for were chosen only because they used to send 0.001 Steem as a "thank you" for voting for their witness, which would all be funnelled back to a central account.

The point, evidently, was not to actually affect people's earnings, but to contribute to the failure of Steemit by focusing mostly on newer accounts with lower SP would wouldn't understand why they'd been downvoted, feel demoralized and quit.

I'll ask @denmarkguy to come look at your post and fill in the gaps, if you like.

Thanks for all your work and Bright Blessings to you and @myskye!