Game Theory indicates there needs to be an opposing action to stop the gaming. This does not mean that such an opposing action must come in the form of the down vote. That nagging idea is the idea that there may be a different opposing action we could use. I have no clue what that would be, as this is simply a little voice I can barely hear off somewhere in the dungeons of my mind.

I was not persuaded by the @bitcoindoom post. The claim that game theory suggests a tit-for-tat strategy (or generous tit for tat) is true in the 2-player prisoner's dilemma, but I'm not convinced that it applies here. That's sort-of like saying that game theory requires negative prices for the free market to work properly.

I think maybe the opposing action that you're looking for might be competition from other authors?

Although I do (reluctantly) admit that there are some cases where flagging is necessary and appropriate, I don't think that value-adjustment is one of those cases.

• That doesn't belong here at all = flag
• I didn't particularly like that or I think that article is over-valued = vote for something else (or better... lots of something elses)

I understand from the crab-bucket example in the whitepaper that downvote was designed to be a value-adjustment mechanism, but 6 months of experience here tells me that it's simply not perceived that way, and in most cases it seems to cause more harm than it mitigates.

At a minimum, if they're going to stay with the design despite the way it is perceived by the platform's users, they need to rename it to something with a more neutral connotation: increase-reward/decrease-reward or bid-up/bid-down or whatever someone can come up with to ease the sting a little bit.