I don't think that structural problems with incentives require any sort of conspiratorial thinking. If you give individual users the ability to flag or downvote posts to tank their discoverability, it is possible for a disconnected group of users to decide to flag a post for less-than-legitimate reasons, even if they're not communicating with each other.
It's a different flavor of Reddit's "downvote for disagreement" status quo. The rules might say one thing, but the behavior of users says another.
It's a different flavor of Reddit's "downvote for disagreement" status quo. The rules might say one thing, but the behavior of users says another.