This is exactly what happened to me. I managed to pick up 6 downvotes. According to steemd.com, the downvotes were as follows:
abit -18,019,851,490,916
smooth -1,010,494,623,757
engagement -422,414,143,516
berniesanders -7,379,281,241
thecyclist -245,377,738,122
nextgencrypto -102,619,770,165
but my top six upvotes were
hendrikdegrote 8,219,277,610,560
jaewoocho 5,372,742,249,385
lafonaminer 2,650,557,916,332
wang 2,310,680,937,121
delegate.lafona 1,316,562,433,153
fyrstikken 105,068,108,918
They weren't just cancelling the whale votes - they were cancelling all the dolphin and minnow votes as well.
Which makes a complete mockery of "lets see what happens when just dolphins and minnows vote"
Also - this thing affects curation rewards for the little person. Even if you were a minnow, it was worth voting manually to see if you could spot a great post at 30 minutes, that would later be picked up by a whale. There is no point bothering now, because each post only seems to earn a dollar, so if you are a really small account, you won't get a curation reward for it anyway. They've broken the entire system.
I expect this experiment to STOP soon. I'm actually trying to have some productive talks with people to see if I can help someway. I am not a powerful steem power person, but I care about this project and the community. Not sure if I can help, but if I can figure out a way that I can, I will.
Abit insists on continuing - and stated that it would be "good" if people start leaving - and smooth apparently agrees with continuing as well. I think other whales should simply stop complying with the requests. This is both a mockery and a failure. When something like this is haphazardly sprung on the community with no defined goals or parameters, and then a large portion of the community says, "this isn't good," then it's time to stop, evaluate where you went wrong, and work to improve the "testing" for the next attempt, if there is one. You don't double down on the stupidity and extend the time frame.