Thanks for your great addings @nathen007! You're right: participating in such an environment requires accountability of all members. Yet, I firmly believe that:

Change can only be made my changing the algorithm.

You can't force people to behave in a certain manner, be fair, publish good content, flag low quality and spam. But you can make it more attractive to them to behave accordingly. It's all about the incentives. Currently it's attractive to buy votes and publish shit :-)