Flagging is not negative karma, it is marking something as spam. You don't see a flag link because you don't have enough karma. As to your post, a new version

Flagging is not negative karma, it is marking something as spam. You don't see a flag link because you don't have enough karma. As to your post, a new version of PostGres is interesting to many people. Release of open source P2P project - not so much. However, your post is actually a blog post that has some interesting info in, so I'd suggest with a better title your post would have appeared much less spammy and encouraged more clicks (e.g. "As of today, JXTA 2.6 is a mature library for P2P in Java". But not that. Just like that. Not that.) As to transparency, no-one sees how many flags a post has (except pg I guess and some automated algorithm.) People must simply make an honest assessment themselves if they think a post is off-topic/spam. By not showing the number of flags pile-on effects are avoided. Multiple flags are required to kill a post, so it would have to be a large, shady conspiracy to bury your P2P software - perhaps the flags came from riaa1 through riaa10!