zlacker

I think as people have become more and more aware that flag negatively weights items for rankings, and isn't just a "hey have the mods look at this rule breaking thing", more people have started using it as a downvote button. It was my understanding that HN originally didn't have a downvote feature to avoid the kind of issues that the flag usage is now causing.

>>Macha+(OP)
Even the highest karma users can lose their flagging privileges, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, if they do it enough times within a time window or if abuse is detected. So from what I understand that issue should be taken care of.