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.
For example, anyone that dislikes {lang} will just downvote any {lang} article
vs
Reading the {lang} article and downvoting it if it's just linkspam