Ask HN: Why can't we comment on “X is Hiring” posts?
I think it would be a good opportunity for people to ask questions about the company and what it's like to work there. Has this been considered?
And, it's also possible that they are used as plain-old "brand recognition advertisements", and no one really gets hired. Unless of course Smarking is hiring dozens of "head of engineering" positions (or turnover is that ridiculously high) [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294446
Edited to add: I see it as a dark pattern because it is not explicitly stated as an "Ad" or "Sponsored", and relies on us navigating somewhere else to determine if this is some kind of special post, or for us to have the experience to recognize it as something different than an organic post.
I.E. If today were your first visit to this site, would you recognize them specifically as promoted / sponsored content?
Ads here are displayed exactly like a post with extremely subtle differences. Anyone new to the site would think it's a post and click it... To me that's a dark pattern
More broadly, dark patterns supplant "user value...in favor of shareholder value".
a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills
Hackernews has minimal ads, lax account requirements, professional moderation, minimal intrusion from owners - and you are hyperventilating about 1 post in a 100 being a marked ad?
If you don't like them just ignore them.
There is nothing misleading about them and they don't trick users because the vast bulk of the visitors to HN knows what these are and if you didn't it's explained in the docs.
They don't trick you into buying anything and they don't serve to market the product of the start-up that is posting the position. The only difference is that they don't have to wait until the 1st of the month and that they get to post an item all by themselves, which seems like a pretty small price to pay compared to say having a site full of advertising or some massive commercial drive.
HN is rather more than less restricted whenever the companies that YC invests in come up, this is the one exception.
But they're not HN submissions, that's the point.
>If they were made to stand out you'd likely be complaining that they get even more preferential treatment because they stand out.
No I wouldn't, but thanks for telling me how I would feel.
If you want to discuss the company or its products you are entirely free to post an article or a text submission.
The amount of entitlement in this thread is quite revolting.
If you think you can build a better HN then maybe you should?
Nothing new was written in this one that wasn't explicitly covered here:
Hackernews started out as a way for YC to talk to their would-be founders (it was called 'start-up news' originally) and the rest of the postings are the noise and those are the signal. If you are unaware of the relationship between YC and HN you could be forgiven but after more than a decade here I don't think that excuse holds.
Marking job ads more explicitly won't change anything, it is just a way to pressure YC into making some change to satisfy nit pickers and there is far more important stuff to do, and is as far as I'm concerned off-topic given that the question was 'why can't we comment on these postings' and that question has been answered afaic.
Furthermore: the who is hiring threads are there as well for everybody else as well, which given the audience and the fact that these compete directly with YC funded companies should be proof positive that no malicious intent was ever present. If it were then those threads would have never happened.
I think I understand why you are defending HN. You see how a small community grew to what it is now, and all of the unpaid work that went into that. I don't think that is in conflict with the idea of being super transparent (to the point where it's obvious to everyone) about things like sponsored posts. It's clearly not obvious to everyone.
You make a good point about the hiring threads. I agree those are evidence that YC is making an effort to support non YC startups.
For what it’s worth, I debated initially commenting at all because I thought it was unlikely to be productive. I’m sure I’m not the only person who considered this (sheer numbers in this case make that unlikely) and they made the choice not to.
Upvotes are a signal of support for an idea in the community. Whether strong or weak is debatable, but implying that they mean the opposite because of all the people who didn't care to vote is silly.
To be fair, it is disclosed on the FAQ page:
Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.
And neither do you if you post in 'who is hiring' on the 1st of the month.
A job ad promotes the existence of a vacancy. The kind of ads that you need to disclose are ads are the ones that are about the product, not about the vacancies at the company producing the product.
Um, no:
> You are not required or incentivized to buy anything.
That said, I think the implicit disclosure via the declaration of affiliation with the site operators – YC – & unique behavior of these posts is sufficient for readers to understand the situation. Even without any label, most people would classify such posts as "job ads".
Whatever harm might accrue to the absolutely densest readers who don't get that seems rather small. Probably less than the harm that other readers might suffer from any crude 'ad' label, which risks leading an even larger group of slightly-less-dense readers to make unwarranted assumptions that such placements are sold for cash via some ad department, or that HN is generally open to paid advertising.
All communication is imperfect, with tradeoffs.
>Smarking (YC W15) Is Hiring a Product Lead to digitize the parking industry (lever.co)
You could disclose it as such
>AD: Smarking (YC W15) Is Hiring a Product Lead to digitize the parking industry (lever.co)
Inline, I assume; "[Ad] Foo hiring bar"
The system and rationale are explained in the HN FAQ and repeatedly reiterated by the mods.
i.e This is one of the things HN gives back to YC, for funding it.
Compared to online advertising, jobs posts targeted at a technical audience seems like a reasonable trade.
Isn't it a dark pattern something that you're not upfront about? Because...
>The system and rationale are explained in the HN FAQ and repeatedly reiterated by the mods.
... I have to go to the FAQ (and how do you easily get to the FAQ when you're on https://news.ycombinator.com, anyway? it's not exactly easy to find, I had to Google it) to learn about it, or a mod has to show up in a thread like this to mention it. There's nothing at face value when the post is on the front page that alludes to what it is, and I'd hardly say that removing the ability to comment on that post does much to clarify what it is.
A pattern can be dark even if unintentionally.
Yes, I agree it's opaque- perhaps not totally clear on first sight.
But a dark pattern has connotations of some intention to deceive, which I don't think is occurring here.
There was another variant more recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31602113.
There's also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... but most of those comments simply explain why the job ads exist.
You can see the guidelines for YC startups posting job ads here: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobguide.html. As you can see there are 6 paragraphs dedicated to neutral titles.
* Founders don't post like that for nefarious reasons. It's just that many of them don't spend much time on HN and have no idea of the finicky conventions of this community.
Nothing quite like hanging out your shingle, putting your professional foot forward, so you promote yourself in the best light possible to potential employers, only for someone to make a snarky comment about your skill set or name. There's at least a few of those each month under various comments from people looking for a new job.
I've even written code to specifically monitor all the replies that get posted in those threads, but it still requires moderator review energy—a scarce commodity if ever there was one.
Companies might decide it’s worth to take a risk, and hope that engaging will differentiate them from others, and generate engagement/good will/hype…
Like a sponsored Show HN
The interview process aeems like the appropriate context for asking questions.
And the context in which it is productive for the company to answer them.
In this regard it is just like other job postings everywhere on the internet.
Anyway, somebody can always start a thread about the same company.
Reddit AMAs-- which I suppose are heavily moderated by the mods and up/down votes-- would be an outlier of this rule.
I'm perfectly willing to suspect the HR cabal, but if I'm a CEO missing 20+ engineering roles month after month, I'd get a new HR and process. Are your CEOs complaining they can't fill all these open jobs?
Things like this, btw:
> You could have your companies report hiring results every month
... come from a mismatch between perception (of how things are over here) and reality (of how things are over here). We'd never do that, not because it would be valueless, but because there are so many other things that need doing which would benefit the community more.
(Again, I don't mean that as a criticism - it's not as if these things are directly perceivable.)
Moreover, it couldn't even be offered as an optional thing given how bad it would look on any company that didn't.
What I would love is the ability for an Ad to be associated with a user account.
Why is the libel issue more a problem with job ads than with any other kind of post that people comment on?
What rot. Any HN story comment is subject to "libel claims" in jurisdictions with poor free speech protections (e.g. Britain), not only "X is hiring stories".
Commentary is the night torch of liberty, shining a critical light on propaganda. YC libertarianism should be eating its own dog food
Do you have any evidence of that? If that's actually true, we would stop those companies from posting job ads. As I said elsewhere, though (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32587596), you really shouldn't be cavalier with allegations of abuse.
> HN largely exists in general to promote YC companies
That's definitely not true, or at least a huge overstatement. I've written a lot about this in the past if anyone wants explanations of how we think about this:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It would be closer to the truth to say that HN exists to help new YC companies come into existence, since the biggest benefit is more startups getting started, applying to YC, and getting funded by YC. Even one large such success would pay for hundreds of years of HN.