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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.