Ask HN: Is flagging a story the same as down voting it?

[thrownaway954]

several times over the past week i've been wanting to down vote some of the stories that have made the front page for various reason. i read in the faq that you should only flag a story if it goes against HN guidelines. the faq states that while there are down vote arrows on comment (after the user reaching a certain threshold) there are never any on stories themselves.

so after all of that, my question is: how do you exactly down vote a story on HN without feeling icky cause you flagged it?

[gervu]

The flag button is the report button.

Flagging puts stuff in the moderation queue to be reviewed for abuse / spam. Please don't abuse it for other purposes.

Downvotes exist, but are hidden until you've posted more than some threshold I forget the exact value of.

The idea is to help prevent the downvote button from being even more of a "I don't like what you're saying but can't muster a convincing response to it" button than it already is, while making it convincingly difficult to manipulate via spam accounts.

It's much better at the second than the first, people being what they are, but it does seem to help with both at least enough to justify the feature's continued existence.

[souprock → gervu]

That's for comments. AFAIK, there is never a downvote button for stories. I think the standards are different for comments and stories. Flagging a comment should be for something kind of abusive, but flagging a story could be just because it doesn't fit here or because it is the zillionth story on the same topic.

[gkbrk]

Just upvote stuff you like, and ignore stuff you don't like. If other people find similar stuff interesting, the front page will be filled with them.

If something made front-page, there are enough people upvoting it that your downvote will not kick it off the first page anyway.

[allwein → gkbrk]

Or "hide" the stuff you don't like. I like to do that so that when I come back 10 times later that day I don't continually have that annoyance when seeing the story again.

[muzani]

From guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

If it's not on topic (interesting) or if it's off topic (politics) feel free to flag it. Also if it has things like clickbait or self-promotion.