I agree with 1 & 2 and I'm also filled with hope for 3...

I do believe we need a lot more downvoting on the platform, making a few of those "free" should help legitimize them as an integral part of the curation mechanism.

I don't think bid-bots or bot votes in general are the core problem, they can be used legitimately, in the end it's those users who use bid-bots daily purely for ROI with bare minimum effort in content production that drive the problem.

An increased risk of catching flags (and losing ROI) would hopefully put a dent into this content-agnostic reward farming behavior and decrease the demand for paid votes at the same time?!