All good points. I wonder if instead of a voting mechanism, a site could crunch things like number of posts, type of posts, length of posts, frequency of posts, replies to posts, and so forth to calculate something like participation/activity/clout scores, assuming this could be used to add value for the community of users. Essentially, mask any gamification of the system so the focus is textual/graphical interaction among users, instead of engaging directly in a ranking/award system.

IME, communities in the analog world engage in ranking, albeit largely unconsciously, and perhaps mimicking this pattern in a digital environment would be beneficial compared to current systems.