I think the biggest problem is not "creeping authoritarianism" or the low quality of quite some questions / answers.

The biggest problem in my opinion are voting rings getting more sophisticated and getting undetected for longer and longer period of time, with users from the rings getting more and more rep before action is taken and basically filling the site with spammy questions/answers (and even probably links to malware). This has the potential to become really nasty soon: at one point you can imagine several users from a voting ring upvoting themselves to 10K rep and starting to slowly vandalize many questions while going undetected for long period of time.

Which means SO is polluted with fake questions / answers. Google results are polluted with fake questions / answers. And high-rep users (the one with enough point to directly edit questions / answers) are wasting time fixing what looks like poor questions or commenting on these, not realizing they're fake questions/answers made by people participating in a voting ring.

Here's a recent example:

http://stackoverflow.com/users/3143873/leonte-george

User has 364 rep as I write this and it's obviously a voting ring made of a few users. If you have a few minutes just open that account and all the questions he answered: they're all from the same two or three same users, sometimes answering twice the same question and obviously getting upvotes and accepted answers from people in his voting ring.

But that's not the issue... The issue is that this is not stopped fast enough: because the mods are too busy wasting time on less important issues concerning users who are perfectly legit.

Despite my 3.8K rep and flagging to moderator attention, nothing is done to stop these fastly.

So on one end you have creeping authoritarianism focusing on not so important issues (like say, the "closing question" police which is super-fast to act when it comes to closing or mark as duplicate legit questions), while on the other end there are real abusers, totally gaming the system, reaching enough rep to create havoc and basically doing vandalism by filling the site with fake questions (and fake answers).

The "proof" that there's a real issues is that several high-rep users spent time fixing (intentional?) typos and grammar errors in these questions, thinking they were real but, mostly, that several people are going to open the profile I just mentioned and not realize it is part of a voting ring.

Now that I post this on HN maybe that HN mods are going to act... Sadly while at the same time explaining that HN is not the place to point out SO issues, that this should be taken to meta (where I'd be downvoted or closed as duplicate etc.).

As a side note I don't understand how a new user can ask six questions, have five of them answered by a single user and all upvoted and accepted without that kind of behavior directly triggering an alarm requiring moderator attention.

So: add the ability to directly flag a user (or a question if it's simpler) as part of a voting ring, add an algo that finds probable voting ring behavior and call immediate moderator attention when such rings are discovered. Also prevent questions which are made by user which have too low of a rep from appearing in Google immediately.

And, no, I'm not taking this to meta: I don't like the "tone" there ; )