Remove YC “[company] is hiring” ads on HN | Hacker News Reader

Remove YC “[company] is hiring” ads on HN

github.com

105 pointsesrh58 comments

You can also just hit 'hide' on any post which has the benefit of also give you a new front page story.

Users flagged this.

I've removed the flags now, in keeping with the principle that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC is the story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

A helpful middleground is to allow us to comment on these threads.

Some of these companies are undesirable for various reasons and for the community to be precluded from discussing their experiences, but only when its a YC company, is disingenuous, and renders the parent comment questionable. We talk about all manner of companies here. Why is a YC company immune from discourse?

Fairness is when every post is treated the same.

You can write stuff about these companies anywhere on HN, you can post stuff about these companies to HN, etc.

> You can write stuff about these companies anywhere on HN

False, you cannot comment on a YC hiring post.

Either all posts are treated the same, or they're not. All we are discussing here is the ability to comment, I'm not saying I need a filter toggle, though I'd happily use one.

These are job ads, you can't go off on tangents in people's job ads on Who's Hiring threads either. All posts are not treated the same and this is one of the biggest not-same type of post on HN. Topicality is pretty important to HN threads. There's really no shortage of ways to be both on topic and say things about more or less any company, YC or not, on HN.

HN is for thoughtful conversation about topics of intellectual curiosity, and job ads are intrinsically uninteresting. Threads on uninteresting, predictable topics tend to be tedious and nasty (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). It's easy to predict what threads on job ads would look like: a generic boo-or-yay referendum on each company, repeated each time. But the highest-motivated commenters would be ones with pre-existing grievances, so it wouldn't even be boo-or-yay. It would mostly just be boo. That would make HN worse, not better.

Uninteresting posts like job ads arguably shouldn't be on HN in the first place, but they're there for an out-of-band reason, which is that it's proper for HN to give something back to YC in exchange for funding it. Since that's their only reason for existing, it doesn't make sense to turn them into regular threads.

The opposite is true of Launch HNs, incidentally, which is one of the other concessions HN gives to YC. In those cases, there is something new and interesting to discuss—the launch of a startup—and since each company only gets one such thread, repeats aren't an issue. It's in HN's interest to have open comment threads on those submissions, so we do: https://news.ycombinator.com/launches.

> But since the only commenters motivated to participate in such discussions would be disgruntled ones with pre-existing grievances, it wouldn't even be boo-or-yay. It would just be boo.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I take issue with this statement though, because daily there are companies posted here that get a critical review, and inevitably a crowd amasses that comes in to provide counterpoints to the negative testimonials, the majority of the time a lot of good on topic and off topic conversations ensue. To me, that makes HN better.

I get that I'll catch heat for even suggesting this, but maybe consider a poll, some day if you have a change of heart. I think you might be surprised that the community would like to participate in those job threads the same way they do in "Whos Hiring?" for example, they're the same nature.

> daily there are companies posted here that get a critical review, and inevitably a crowd amasses that comes in to provide counterpoints to the negative testimonials, the majority of the time a lot of good on topic and off topic conversations ensue.

Aren't those companies already established? Isn't the topic usually about something related to a new product or scandal? Usually the topic circles around that. A new YC startup job ad likely won't have that.

With that said, any YC startups want to give it a shot? Allow comments and see if the questions helps with their recruitment? Might help craft a better ad.

> With that said, any YC startups want to give it a shot? Allow comments and see if the questions helps with their recruitment? Might help craft a better ad.

Wow that's a good idea, and compromise that I had not considered. Imagine if it were optional, that's a great solution to satisfy both sides and puts the startup in control of their own involvement.

We don't allow testimonials and discussions and criticisms of companies in the ordinary non-YC job "Who's Hiring" thread either; once a month, Dan has to go patrol those threads looking for people trying to start off-topic discussions on people's job ads.

I'm honestly fine with them. These posts are the reason this site gets to exist without needing some other more nefarious monetisation. Ads can be a lot worse...

Does anyone have a knowledgeable story for what YC sees HN as? Without knowing that, it's difficult to say why this site gets to exist.

I wrote about it here (ignore the first half of the post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285793

Similar other past comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

It makes sense to me that most YC Big Wigs would be indifferent towards HN, but will quickly come down on it if their preferred companies are getting lambasted by comments on their own website.

Probably best to not shake the pot.

Can we get comments enabled on them? I'd be interested to see what other people have to say about the companies. I think it'd be an interesting compromise. They don't really bother me either way.

Comments are disabled because many startups are terrible employers and having those reviews right next to the ads would kill revenue for HN. Can't have the truth interfere with the business model.

I won't block 'em, but tbh, some of the titles are real cringe, which is a good indicator for who to avoid, I guess.

I like the ones who continue to appear for ages - I wonder if BuildZoom will ever get that engineer!

Or Flexport

Flexport looks super interesting, I almost reached out to them at some point.

Been actually thinking about joining Flexport.

Maybe they are hiring multiple engineers

I don't think so

hah. put OneSignal in that batch as well.

As someone who works with OneSignal’s product... can a competent engineer apply there PLEASE?

Plot twist: They're all competent. Tear down that interview wall...

It's on my list to do more about the bad titles. We do fix them when we see them. We also tell the startups not to do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobguide.html.

If an irritating one shows up, you (or anyone) are welcome to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com.

Thanks. Titles that I find bad may be very subjective, so I'd do good to keep them to myself, I'd have thought.

The next time, I'll report when I come across them, but know that most of us on news.yc drink a lot of kool-aid and live in a bubble of our own (:

I have been using the following script on uBlock Origin for some time. It's quite an ugly selector though:

news.ycombinator.com##tr.athing:has(+ tr .subtext .age:first-of-type)

news.ycombinator.com##tr:has(> .subtext .age:first-of-type)

I am thoroughly entertained by how this elicited an emotional reaction from me. I guess I feel loyal to the site.

Posting this here embodies the spirit of Hacker News in a weirdly layered meta commentary.

I’m probably thinking too hard about it but I enjoyed this

On a sidenote: why can't we comment on these? I have a feeling I know why, but I need to hear someone with a YC shirt on say it.

I'm not the person you're looking for, but I don't think the reason is anything nefarious. It's just that the posts have a single point, which is to tell you the company is hiring. If you let people comment, it inevitable devolves into some nitpicking or criticism of the company (or more rarely some kind of shilling) which frustrates the purpose of the post.

If there is a news story, a "my experience at company X" blogpost, any kind of relevant point to be made about that company, someone could submit that as a story.

Letting people comment on job ads would just turn them into lightning rods for whatever bad things people want to say, and then what would be the point?

I'm sure I have seen a moderator reply in one of the who is hiring threads saying something similar that allowing comments just attracts criticism and derails the threads

> Letting people comment on job ads would just turn them into lightning rods for whatever bad things people want to say, and then what would be the point

Hearing whatever bad (or possibly good) things people have to say about company X is exactly what I would want and would greatly increase the value, of those posts as well as my likelihood of clicking on them.

Isn't it possible someone might have something good to say about the company and why you should work there?

For a response "from someone with a YC shirt", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31602113 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285793

I think at the very least comments should be allowed on those posts, even if only by high karma accounts to lessen the number of trolls.

That's not a great idea, some of the folks here with the most karma are just familiar names who talk the most like myself, they don't always have great opinions.

I agree, I'm probably in the same boat with 5000+ karma but for the most part worthless comments and oftentimes getting yelled at by dang, but some filtering would be better than none at all. My guess is that companies don't want people to comment on their posts because of fear of the conversation turning extremely negative, since probably most people to comment would be people who have a bone to pick for some reason. I notice that reddit also doesn't allow commenting on their ads, even though the ads present themselves for the most part as just another post(just like hn)

I've seen reddit ads with comments enabled, I think it's an option.

For all the people asking HN to just allow comments on their job ads, why not just fork the linked repo and add a side-channel to the job ad posts for discussion?

It can even use https://loginwithhn.com/ to guarantee the identities of users

Look, you can make and use whatever extension you like. But, posting something like this here, is a lack of respect for this website and its community. Because the visibility that these posts get are the least we can offer to this forum for what it gives us. And you can simply hide them.

I'm not sure how meaningful it is to ask an author who proclaims to not use HN to comport their attitude or behavior to your understanding of respecting HN. But I see this as well within the bounds of HN community spirit — IMO the heart of hacking was originally more about defying authority or boundaries than entrepreneurial or industry interest.

This resonates with me. I appreciate HN enough to at least consider the YC offerings when they appear.

...And one of my worst/most insulting interview experiences was with a YC company.

Tis the reason for the season and all that. :)

I am curious if none of you use an ad blocker, ever.

I hate ads but in all fairness those posts are the most ideal kind of ad. Eg. It’s targeted by virtue of the website, not by harvested user data

That s quite the overreaction

Seriously. I feel like I've seen... three of these. They're about as unintrusive as it gets.

The hiring posts don't bother me at all.

But I certainly have personal hangups about silly things that bother me to the point of distraction, even in small quantities. For example if an article has an animated gif in it, I literally can't read it once I've seen it. So I can understand why some people might get put off by something seemingly minor. And making a blocker is a good solution, even if very niche.

HN exists as basically a job board with submissions in between to being people in. But considering how non invasive these ads are I really don't see the issue. I get it, services have to be paid for somehow and I'd rather see some text ads then have my information sold

Thank you for making this. One of the worst parts about hacker news

thanks, ublock can't easily zap them anymore.

Here's an installable userscript with this promo hiding technique along with the ability to remove submission in your feed by site.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/433199-hacker-news-filter-...

How about a firefox version?

It's an userscript, there are userscript extensions on Firefox e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/

Best part is "Note: I do not read the orange site."

I almost wish they were in italics or something.

Or a different color

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