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As my title says, it was the first time I had issued a flag. There was this answer to one of my questions that clearly was spam. It was a clear advertising of a website/application and in no way answers or even relates to my question, and it was from a new contributor.
I flagged it as a spam and shortly after I got a notification of a -1 reputation. When I clicked the notification it brought me to the "answer" I had just flagged.
I thought I was helping maintain the quality of answers on this site by doing this, and to get a deduction (even a meager -1 reputation) was pretty discouraging. Did I really just get a deduction from flagging? I read the different flags carefully and am absolutely sure it's spam.