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No. You should not flag stories as a way to down-vote them. If you do that regularly, you will lose your flagging privileges.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>"If you think a story is spam or off-topic, flag it by clicking on its "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)"

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You can also flag duplicate submissions. Lots of people submit the same article as one that's already being discussed on the front page (or an essentially identical article from a different source), or an article that was submitted dozens of times a couple of days ago and actively discussed.

(HN's dupe detector only catches duplicates that have exactly the same URL.)

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