StackOverflow Scoring Flaw

<rant>

Recently, I had posted that I had joined StackOverflow, and that I was starting to gain reputation in the community. Yesterday, I encountered two things, which make me wonder about the validity of the scoring system at StackOverflow.

Apparently, as the current scoring system stands, people can do what has been referred to as "Tactical Downvoting", and also a user can wreak havoc on a newer user's reputation without consequences.

Tactical Downvoting:

When a user finds an unanswered question to which they know or think they know the answer, they can post their own answer, and then downvote all other answers. While this may cost them a limited amount of their own reputation (-1 for each downvote), this costs the other users twice as much for each downvote. This also increases the visibility of the user's post, as posts with higher votes are displayed first by default (0 being higher than -1).

So, if I and 3 other users post answers to the same question, and I immediately downvote the other answers, mine will then show at the top, increasing the chances that it will be voted up and/or accepted. My reputation will get -3 for the downvotes. The other users will each suffer a -2 loss. For each time my answer is voted up, I get +10 reputation. If my answer is accepted, I get an additional +15 reputation.

Therfore, for a small loss, I can potentially rule out other valid (possibly MORE valid) answers, and have my reputation raised higher.

Wreaking Havoc:

My reputation suffered a nearly 10% loss after apparently irritating someone with a reputation quite a bit higher than mine by questioning the syntax he had used in his posting. I found that about half of my posted answers had been downvoted shortly after this encounter, and the user all but admitted it in answer to my asking why. Now, StackOverflow runs scripts to detect this sort of malicious behavior, and removes the downvotes, however, their script does NOT restore reputation.

So, for a sacrifice of all of my current reputation on the site (559 at the time of this writing), I could effectively bring someone with a reputation of 1000 down to 0. Yes, it's true that my reputation would suffer too... but after having gotten more reputation, it would be pretty easy to wipe out a newer user.

Summary:

While I definitely think that the StackOverflow team's hearts are in the right place (for the most part), I think that there's still quite a bit of fine tuning to be done to the scoring system, to ensure that users with high reputation actually SHOULD have a high reputation.

For instance, making it where you can't downvote answers for a question you've answered, and vice versa. This would ENTIRELY prevent tactical downvoting. If you think your answer is right, and the others are wrong, let the community decide. You wouldn't let an interviewee interview your other applicants...

Also, your downvote to upvote ratio should be set to ensure that you're not only casting downvotes. Case in point, the user who downvoted all my answers has a +15/-24 ratio, meaning he's cast nearly twice as many downvotes as upvotes. And that's AFTER the other downvotes were removed. My current ratio at the time of this writing is +40/-2. While this wouldn't entirely stop a user from mass downvoting, it would certainly stop it in certain circumstances.

Additionally, the penalty of casting a downvote should be equal to the reward from receiving an upvote (-10). The penalty for receiving a downvote should be an equal penalty to casting a downvote. Thus, a user casting downvotes could never gain an edge over a user they cast against. Why shouldn't someone agreeing with you be equal to someone DISagreeing with you?

</rant>