Down votes have the indirect effect of increasing the potential amount other posts can be awarded in a given day because there is a finite reward pool per day. Some whales see it as their duty to keep things "fair" by reducing the rewards on so-called over rewarded posts. This practice is quite contentious, though perfectly defensible by the fact that each user is free to up or down vote as they please.
To clear up a few things:
- No money is "taken away", the figure you see before rewards are processed are estimates. Before processing, they are all potential rewards
- I would suggest that people do not necessarily up or down vote rationally, though people do respond to being called out on it, for the most part. Note that down votes affect reputation negatively in proportion to the Steem Power of the down voter.
- Some people do blindly up vote, there are certain bots out there that vote on anything. The vote counter does not take into account the weight at which the vote was made. It could have been 1% and add very little reward to the post
- When lots of minnows up vote, the effect is small. You cannot know why they vote, but perhaps it is just for support. It cannot be for reward support however since their effect is so small.
- It is very typical to have more up votes than views. I don't believe the views are broken as such, but bear in mind that views are not processed at a blockchain level, they are only counted on steemit.com, so if they are viewed by any other system, such as eSteem (mobile app), busy.org or other, this does not increase views. I personally think the view counter will disappear eventually because of this. So to directly answer "Can articles be viewed without being counted?" : yes.
Thanks for taking the time to respond - I really appreciate it! You've made a lot of things clear to me! :)
How does one downvote? I don't even see this option. Do I need a higher reputation before that is available?
Yeah, same @geocurt. I think you're supposed to go to their profile page and flag their content? That's what I do (I did this once because someone just blatantly copy-pasted two of their articles from news sites).