How this submission got negative votes is the oddity that people are trying to figure out. Regular users can't downvote, and I don't see a reason why it'd be a moderator action for this post, so I'd assume some bug/edge-case in vote handling.
No other /newest submissions (current or that I've previously seen) have negative score. I checked a bunch of your submissions (using https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663) and none appear to have ever been negative.
It's possible that this issue was happened to be caused by a bot, but what you're describing as a regular occurrence ("Down always comes first") is probably a misrecollection about comment downvotes rather than submission downvotes - or about reddit which does have submission downvotes.
No other /newest submissions (current or that I've previously seen) have negative score. I checked a bunch of your submissions (using https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663) and none appear to have ever been negative.
It's possible that this issue was happened to be caused by a bot, but what you're describing as a regular occurrence ("Down always comes first") is probably a misrecollection about comment downvotes rather than submission downvotes - or about reddit which does have submission downvotes.