Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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They could be on topic in lots of places, assuming they relate to some interesting point under discussion and are not just a grudge against X.

You're right in part, but standards aren't binary, they involve messy interpretation. There's no law of the excluded middle—it's all middle and it's all included. So instead of asking 'what are the axioms to be universally applied on this site', you need to ask 'what in this context will make the site better or worse in the long run'. I know that's unsatisfying but we can't do better.

So the point is more like this: had we a way to allow only the replies to job ads which are true and fair, while filtering out the misleading or disgruntled ones, that might make the job board better overall. But we have no such way, and the damage caused by false or misleading replies is the bigger risk.

Job hunting and hiring both suck, but there are limits to what we can do about it here. Allowing Who Is Hiring threads to turn into a combination job-board-plus-Glassdoor-style pelting range would not benefit the community in the long run. Knowing HN's limits and respecting them is one of the secrets of keeping this place going well. Not that it's a secret.

Dan, I appreciate the thoughtful and measured response. But let me offer a counterpoint: you could apply the same logic to any comment anywhere.

Take yesterday's topic on Microsoft potentially acquiring GitHub. How many anonymous comments are there slagging Microsoft (or GitHub)? No one has any way to verify the credibility of comments there, either.

The question is: do complaining about a negative experience (real or imagined) present any long-term benefit to the community and to the original poster?

If the comment is junk or fake then the poster has the ability to respond as such (or profess ignorance). But the community gains by either being warned about a potential job opportunity or seeing how the hirer responds.

I understand not turning this into Glassdoor/Yelp bottom-feeding but I was specifically referencing the recent hiring practices of this particular company, not reviewing them as a whole or judging their leadership or corporate direction or promotion systems etc.

I think if you really want no replies it should be hardcoded into the HN architecture, but the antiseptic posting of job listing, without any potential input from people who've recently gone through the process, is IMHO a loss for the HN community -- if I just want unadorned job listings, I can get that many other places than HN, and with much better filtering technology.

I recognize this is a gray area but I really think commenters should be allowed to share interviewing experiences with companies who post here -- keeping HN from becoming a complaining ground is more complex than just banning comments, IMHO.

Thanks for listening.

> you could apply the same logic to any comment anywhere.

That was, essentially, my point all along.

Unfortunately, I think that what dang is saying is that the job posting thread requires special treatment and guidelins that are, inexplicably [1] far more strict than the overall HN guidelines, in order to protect the community from damage.

> If the comment is junk or fake then the poster has the ability to respond as such (or profess ignorance).

Or even not dignify it with a response! Surely, HN readers can be trusted to tell difference between "just a grudge" (or corporate equivalent of ad-hominem or any other actually off-topic comment) and a legitimate comment, even complaint, about the hiring process.

> I think if you really want no replies it should be hardcoded into the HN architecture

I have also suggested this in the past, especially since it won't incur any editorial/moderation effort or ambiguity.

[1] This lack of explanation or reasoning is one of my recurring objections

> the antiseptic posting of job listing, without any potential input from people who've recently gone through the process, is IMHO a loss for the HN community -- if I just want unadorned job listings, I can get that many other places than HN, and with much better filtering technology.

Since it's too late to edit my previous comment, I wanted to add that, though I've advocated/suggested such comment-free posting as a technical feature, I do agree with your sentiment, overall.

The only exception is that there would still be a link to the poster's HN profile, which might contain enough information to provide some context or feeling of community to the job posting.

Otherwise, as you imply, there's no connection meaningful connection to HN in any of the job postings.

> They could be on topic in lots of places, assuming they relate to some interesting point under discussion

Perhaps I didn't ask the question clearly enough. Let me rephrase: Where would I go, as an HN user, to discuss a particular job posting, where it is either the posting itself or the job application process directly related to the posting that is the interesting point under discussion?

> So instead of asking 'what are the axioms to be universally applied on this site', you need to ask 'what in this context will make the site better or worse in the long run'.

I'm not actually asking the former. I'm well aware that everything is guidelines and grey areas.

What I'm asking is, what's so special about the job posting thread that it requires much stricter rules (yet without technical enforcement)? What is the mechanism of the benefit to the site in the long run?

> But we have no such way, and the damage caused by false or misleading replies is the bigger risk.

I keep seeing this justification, but I honestly wonder where it comes from. Specifically, what is the damage to HN itself?

Also, why is this justification not equally applied to false or misleading job postings and only to the replies?

As my sibling-comment pointed out, this is potentially true of any comment anywhere. Again, what's so special about this thread?

> Allowing Who Is Hiring threads to turn into a combination job-board-plus-Glassdoor-style pelting range would not benefit the community in the long run.

I think it's unfair, possibly even insulting, to the HN community to say that permitting any level of complaint is the same as allowing a "pelting range". It's a false dichotomy or a slippery slope argument, at best.

Nobody is advocating for a free-for-all.

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