Hacker News Reader

Comment by djbrowning | Hacker News Reader

That's a really interesting point. Our concern with free listings was a flood of poor content, which would hide the good ones.

View on HN

that's a good problem to have...that means you are actually popular enough for people to exploit....then you can introduce the paid pricing.

for now you can easily moderate postings yourself.

That's a good point. Thanks.

for now you can easily moderate postings yourself.

I would suggest using Turk or finding another resource that can do the manual moderating, you need to be expanding the core tech and business. Getting bogged down in these kind of tasks can kill your momentum.

I totally disagree.

If they don't see who's posting and what's being posted, how can they know if they're doing a good job. How can they spot the opportunity and pivot?

I know you don't mean it this way, but in a way you are saying hide from the customers and carry on coding.

Manually checking every post could be an excellent way of figuring out who's using the site and what the common frustrations are.

If they were getting 100 listings a day it would be a different matter, but I doubt they will be getting that many.

Just because they dont manage every post does not mean they cannot check post to see the nature of their business intelligence. Just as PG does not read ever one of the articles and lets the user flag articles that are spam so can they use individuals to weed through the crap, by the nature of the job the person will be getting rid of the crap and only leaving legitimate posts, there is no value in weeding through the crap themselves unless they are going to pivot into a link spam software company. You are mixing the idea of the job of eliminating spam with business insight, the two are not linked and I still contend that wading through spam for a developer or owner is an absolute waste of resources for a start-up. Especially when a hire could do it for a 3rd of a developers costs.

I don't know how much Turk costs or how well it works, so I don't know if it would be a wise expenditure if you're not making any money. Again, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. Not charging would invite more spam submissions, but deprive you of a revenue stream to fund outsourcing of moderation. But if payment is required before you even have to moderate submissions, that would minimize the amount of spam you'd even have to see.

I disagree that it would be wise in general to invest a lot of time in "expanding the core tech and business". I would have started working on http://WheresTheRemote.com/ sooner if I hadn't put it off waiting until I had time to build the application I envisioned in between client projects. Eventually I realized that the hard part was going to be attracting users / advertisers and that I could launch the site and just moderate and update it manually or semi-manually until / unless I had the welcome problem, as vaksel mentioned, of having too many ad submissions to keep up with. (Welcome if there are enough legit submissions, anyway.)

In any case, remote jobs are a niche market. There's an implied limitation on the number of ads that will be in play, so it probably makes sense to pace work on the technology according to the amount of interest / activity / revenue the site actually generates. In the beginning it might be most practical to just manually moderate submissions, and maybe implement something like CAPTCHA.

"Remote jobs" may be a larger niche than these discussions seem to assume.

"Remote technical jobs" is a niche that interests me (I found my current remote development job via HN) but "remote jobs" in general makes me think of all the spam email I get to get rich working from home (stuffing envelopes or jebus-knows-what-else). There's a huge difference between the high-powered developer who wants to live someplace beautiful and the out-of-work grocery store clerk who's reading the spam about "make thosandds from the comfort of you're own home" (and the "employers" targeting these people...).

With WheresTheRemote you're possibly shooting yourself in the foot a bit with the name; I wouldn't look to a site seemingly television-related for a technical job (to post one, or to find one). If you're actually looking for remote jobs of the sort that unskilled people can do while watching TV, you'll probably need to make it pretty cheap to post a listing (and regardless, certainly do something to get the ball rolling -- from the text on the front page, it seems like you don't have a single posting).

remote-jobs has some hints on the targeted niche based on the categories on the home page (seems closer to the HN remote listings, though it might help to explain your niche more explicitly).

Another thought on getting the ball rolling (for either site): what you really want is a set of really plum job listings in your niche that you can feature on the front page, and convince job seekers that there are good opportunities here (and job advertisers that they're on a site that is/will be attracting serious prospects). Maybe ask the employers with those great listings to self-select and contact you directly, and you'll post their positions for free?

Then maybe your solution is one that ensures the good ones rise to the top?

Maybe if registered users were allowed to downvote crappy postings?

How about if high karma users were allowed?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com