The first thing this has me thinking is that it looks like a "subreddit" of HN. I'm surprised to not have seen or heard of a Reddit style site with HN voting rules on it.
Not quite, no. You can't downvote stories (only comments, when you reach an appropriate karma level) and the algorithms for story/comment decay seem to be wildly different.
Hacker News isn't really that different- people flag the article instead of downvoting it, so it takes even fewer people to bury a story. It's happened more times than I can count.