IMO, this really really has not been given enough attention. @berniesanders explained the downvote. To me, at least the explanation was pretty compelling.

The post that got downvotes was positively absurd. It was a guy who made all his money on steemit because of his well known name and because a group of whales decided to vote for him posting about how to write a successful post on steemit.

Now thats fine that hes well known. But you can't then go on to write a post about the "secrets to making a lot of money on steem" when your "secret" is that he youre famous. And to make matters worse, his "secret" was something that has been done to death as a post on steemit. Vauge, common sense posting guidelines that have been posted 100 times. ANd when they were posted before by authors on curation lists, they should have been downvoted all those times too.

ANd also, @berniesanders wasn't nearly strong enough to remove all payment himself. there were plenty of people who agreed that it was a shitty post.