Some users are flagging them as duplicates apparently, and that negatively affects ranking:
>Although submissions cannot be downvoted, flags act as a "super" downvote and enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission, or kill it entirely (flagging is supposed to be used for submissions which break the site guidelines, but that isn't always the case in practice).
>Although submissions cannot be downvoted, flags act as a "super" downvote and enough flags will strongly reduce the rank of the submission, or kill it entirely (flagging is supposed to be used for submissions which break the site guidelines, but that isn't always the case in practice).
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...