I've been seeing this only recently. There seems to be someone going in and downvoting not just the question, but every last answer to it as well.
I don't know if this is, or should be a concern, but I thought I'd alert folks to it.
The latest example is here: Mistake correction in representing
Is this something we should be concerned about?
Is this something we should be concerned about?
There's a rep penalty for downvoting answers, as well as a daily vote maximum for each user. As long as a user is contributing enough to sustain their indiscriminate downvoting habits, I for one can live with it.
Up/downvoting is anonymous - there is not much we as moderators can do about such things.
I believe that Stack Exchange employees could access data directly from the database if the situation was problematic and systemic enough but I suspect they would be fairly hesitant to do so.
Also, I should add that people's reading speed varies greatly. I read/skim/assimilate information quite fast, which definitely helps. I am sure others can do this faster than me, too.
Is this something we should be concerned about?
Not unless you've identified more of a pattern than is evident from your post. People are free to vote however they choose with only a few limitations. Since voting is anonymous and people hardly ever justify their votes, there's no real way to tell if you've found malicious behaviour.
For instance, I'll do this very often for obviously off-topic questions, and I'm not alone, see: Should one downvote answers to off-topic questions? If people answer a low-value, off-topic or unclear question with a low-value answer that took less than a minute to write then you can bet that I'll downvote the lot of it. So that's at least one scenario where this kind of voting pattern is legitimate.
You mentioned the following in a comment: "I think it's downvoting the answers because they're not liking the questions." Keep in mind that even if that were indeed happening, I don't see how that isn't a legitimate use of a person's vote.
Full disclosure: I didn't downvote the question or answer that prompted your question and in fact had already upvoted your answer previously.
I will sometimes do this if the question is bad enough and none of the answers are up to the quality expectations that I have. A question that blatantly asks for a bad subjective opinion, and then gets bad subjective answers will tend to get lots of down votes from me. Part of the reason is I personally want to encourage people not to engage with this type of question unless they can provide a high quality answer.
In most cases i would have downvoted those same answers even if the question was a good one. A bad answer is always a bad answer.
On the linked question I personally do not think the question is high quality, but also not off topic or bad subjective. I also that the answer that RichardU provided is not super high quality is reasonable, and I think it could be improved greatly. But I believe it is largely correct and is explained well enough to be helpful to others in a similar situation. Though I could see someone else disagreeing and downvoting it.
The other answer however contains a bad subjective opinion and while probably reaching the bare minimum expectations for an answer explanation it is unlikely to be terribly helpful if someone finds themselves in a similar situation. So it earns a down vote.
