Looking at the people affected, I can distinctly see two groups of Meta regulars with very defined ideas on several topics (even if those "groups" actually change between topics), which gives me the gut feeling that some kind of anti-mob-vote-script has been deployed, and has hit all of the Meta regulars merely because we are few and tend to fall in one of two or three groups per topic (inclusionists/deletionists, pro-cursing/anti-cursing/meh-cursing, pepsi/coca-cola, vim/emacs, C#/Java, etc.).
If this is true, I not only think that the implementation really sucks, it didn't take into account that people in small communities (Meta/obscure tags) will trigger this.
This is discouraging to say the least.
If there is another reason, the only I can think about is that Jeff wanted to give Meta a clean state of downvotes for whatever reason, or that he is preparing us to take away the downvoting mechanism form Meta, which would be a far worse mistake than whatever happened here.
Seems like we got our downvotes back.
Mmm...
[status-workaround-found]
: turned my monitor upside down. Now meta looks normal again.