Hacker News Reader

People are supposed to flag submissions that do not belong here. It's obvious that many of the NSA articles didn't belong here - there was nothing intellectually stimulating about them and they contained no new information. The discussions didn't have any useful advice about protecting your information, or about what to do as a startup if a government agency requested your data, or etc.

There are repercussions for too much flagging - you (so I've been told) lose the ability to flag anything.

You can't downvote submissions (or at least, I can't. If you can it must require a certain karma threshold). So perhaps some see flagging as the only option for expressing disapproval of a given story.

To downvote comments, you need to have a certain amount of Karma though I don't remember the exact number.

There is no "downvote" for submissions. Your options are: upvote, ignore & flag