I wanted to chime in here, as I recently had something like this happen to me.

Demotruk had a good conversation with me about everything and many other users chimed in to. Though I wish they said something to me first, instead of downvoting me, I still learned a valuable lesson.

I think if at all possible, comment on the persons posts and try to teach them what they are doing is bad. Try to explain and teach them first before downvoting them.

When you just start downvoting someone into oblivion you are going to make a lot of people angry and just leave STEEM. Not all people are abusers of the system and beyond hope of changing. I think a lot just don't understand the issues they cause and they don't know about the reward pool(I didn't).

I didn't know about the reward pool. I bought .4 BTC worth of Steem, converted half into my own Steempower, and rented 8,700 Steempower for 4 weeks. My goal was to upvote myself 4 or 5 times a day and upvotes others with the rest, so I could make my investment back while helping others. The problem with that is when i did this Steem was like 1.70USD, when it went in half the only way for me to gain most of it back was to 100% upvote myself. So you can see the dilemma in this specific case, why would anyone buy Steempower if they are not allowed to upvote themselves? It is one thing to target spammers who are doing it I agree, for the most part I wouldn't say I was spamming. But I fully understand how people see things regardless.

I think in the end it is more productive to the spammer and the entire community, to see the example set. Rather than mass downvote someone into oblivion as a first resort(which should only be used for people who refuse to listen to reason).

The main thing I see getting spammed is randowhale and whaleshares stuff. It is all automated and those things are voting spam posts. People are paying Steem for an upvote bot service, when it should be a manuel vote service with rules and restrictions against spam. If I wanted to right now, I could upvote a garbage comment with randowhale or something else. That is what people are abusing right now and it will get worse as time goes on. It will get worse because all of the whales are making tons of profit from this service and their incentive is to continue. I think we should really focus there and the ramifications of upvote botting paid services.

I hope that all makes sense. I spend my time now working on helping others and trying to give good comments.

I realize it is hard to communicate emotion, so just wanted to also add I had a horrifying experience in the beginning when I saw I was being downvoted, to then having a great one afterwards with lots of helpful comments. If we can cut out the horrifying experience of mass downvoting(only use as last resort), I think people would participate more in helping to correct others harmful self voting actions.