What recently happened to her is yet another issue caused by the huge influence disparity.
In a fairer system where everyone has a voice this would be a non issue, users would have just upvoted to bring the post back up.
The reason people were so fired up about the issue is that they had no way to bring it back up, they felt powerless about the situation and their only recourse was to send donations.
I've seen a lot of steemians portraying smooth as evil,etc...Don't blame smooth blame the code. Smooth is just using the tools that are given to him in a way that he wants. There is also one thing many don't realize is that when whales upvote a post, they take away rewards from every other posts. It happens a lot more subtly but the result is the same, a reduction of your post's payout.
Some users even want to 'remove the downvote option' because of this. What if a rich pedophile started upvoting all his kiddy porn content? Would you not want to be able to downvote it and reduce payouts?
The downvote function is an integral part of system, the unbalance in power made this feature controversial when in fact it is essential.
If a dolphin would have reduced karenmckersie's post from $50 to $47 or if 20 dolphins would have reduced it from $50 to $25 no one would be bragging about it. So again don't blame smooth blame the underlying system.