As jacquesm says,<p>+ <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986986" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986986</a><p>+ <a href="http://jacquesmattheij.com/HackerNews%2C+now+with+downvotes" rel="nofollow">http://jacquesmattheij.com/HackerNews%2C+now+with+downvotes</a><p>... flags are already counted as down votes. He does also say this (in his item)<p><pre><code> > The downside of this being an obscure feature is that
> knowledge of it could be abused by the less scrupulous
> to push undesired articles off the homepage using a
> series of flags.
>
> Another way to abuse this is by downvoting everything
> except for the articles that you upvote
</code></pre>
PG has stated elsewhere that he has an "indiscriminant flagging" detector, and that when it gets triggered, subsequent flags from that person don't get counted.