Downvotes on comments need a little bit of karma. Now downvotes on submissions, those are not normally doable by random users.

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GaryBluto 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps some kind of auto-downranking system used for moderation of specific topics or thigns (without explicitly removing them) that accidentally targeted said post? Just idle speculation.

	▲	pavon 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Seeing as how HN normally automatically strips "how" out of a title such that "How I Journal" becomes "I Journal", having both "how" and "why" in the title may have been just too much for the modbot to handle on a Tuesday morning.
	▲	kotaKat 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		which is weird, because normally they just ratelimit you to oblivion and back - not even allow the post in the first place. or just set you to be automatically dead. unless this is just a glitch of early ranking to get posts onto frontpage that posts start with an invisible negative amount of points and get upvoted out of new and the invisible negatives to frontpage? (eg all posts start out with some value of negative points between -10 and 0 or something and the new votes will help nudge it out to the frontpage?)

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Unai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's correct AFAIK, submissions can't be downvoted.

If anyone's interested, here's a list of undocumented HN features/rules (although I don't know how up to date it is): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

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bryanrasmussen 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

right, I have reasonably high karma and I can't downvote submissions, although I can flag them.

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Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea you can't downvote submissions.

Now, the post linked itself has been upvoted so it doesn't have negative submissions but it seems to have had been the case.

I don't quite understand how posts can have negative points :-/

A hunch but maybe a post which got confused as comment id of some other comment which got downvoted so you had negative karma, but I am unsure of this spooky action at a distance. It would be really interesting to know the reason behind it.