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Comment by rickhanlonii | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to add some code to this, it may make sense to add an additional rule around who is allowed to post that is related to karma and/or account age.

If you compare top and bottom of the May 2015 thread it seems that the quality drops with newer accounts or low karma accounts.

I think a rule like this would also ensure that it's this community posting to the thread and not someone from the outside trying to post to yet another job board--which is the spirit of the "no recruiters" rule.

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I like this idea. The threshold could be small.

Any objections?

I generally find the bias against recruiters here to be a bit narrow minded and short sighted. Yes, they're a pain. Yes, most are idiots misrepresenting themselves from the first second they talk to me.

But I'm all about increasing interactions. Not restricting them based on race, gender, or having a unfortunate job title like "recruiter."

I'd rather let in 500 crappy posts than turn away a single valuable newcomer to HN. Has upvote/downvote truly proven inadequate for moderating this particular thread?

>I'd rather let in 500 crappy posts than turn away a single valuable newcomer to HN

I'm not sure exactly what ratio I'd tolerate, but I think that's a bit extreme.

I'd rather not have 500 crappy posts for every single valuable post. The former starts detracting from the site and ultimately decreases quality. You'll eventually reach a breaking point where everything is being drowned in the noise. Downvoting only works if you're an active enough participant, especially when it comes to the who is hiring posts many probably have minimal or zero participation.

I would object. This creates exclusivity that somebody well-intentioned, but without an account (you don't need an account to browse HN everyday), wouldn't be able to overcome.

If you want to prevent recruiters then the principle-company's email address should be in the job description and/or a link to that company's job description (maybe this could be required if the threshold wasn't overcome). Also, most recruiters don't want to reveal the name of the company hiring, so requiring real company names (I guess you would have to ban 'stealth' startups) would be necessary too.

> This creates exclusivity that somebody well-intentioned, but without an account [...] wouldn't be able to overcome.

Right, which is why we're generally opposed to restrictions on posting despite the headaches of being a public optionally-anonymous forum. We don't want to miss the chance of having, say, Alan Kay show up to comment on PARC, or someone who did a Ph.D. on a topic make an account to comment on it.

But posting to a monthly Who Is Hiring thread isn't really a serendipity thing. You have to know a bit about the community to do it—and if you do know a bit about the community, getting to 5 or 10 karma is easy. Even if it took a while, you wouldn't likely miss a thread, because they stay open for 2 weeks.

We've been getting a lot of emails from people asking how to post jobs in these threads, and although we always answer them, I sometimes do so with a sinking feeling that these are probably not quite the sort of posts the community wants to see more of. A very small karma threshold—just enough to be a speed bump—would probably take care of most of that. However I'm not attached to the idea.

Edit: I should add that we wouldn't do this without looking at the data first. "Looking at the data" in this case means looking at all the comments posted to those threads by accounts below a certain karma and/or age. If there were lots of high-quality posts in there, we wouldn't do it.

> I should add that we wouldn't do this without looking at the data first.

+1 and I'd be interested in seeing this data summarized. I looked through the May 2011-2015 posts and a cursory inspection led to my suggestion. I saw a few posts from new or low karma users which were fine, so there will be some casualties with a speed bump and the data should justify the benefits before implementing.

If the threshold is low enough (e.g. 50) I'd be all for it. The internet is awash with mediocre, recruiter posted tech jobs. Raising the bar ever so slightly for posting to HN doesn't seem like a negative to me.

I wasn't thinking anywhere near 50. Perhaps 10 at most. More likely 5 would be enough.

I happily yield to your better judgement on this :)

There are quite a few lurkers on HN who don't post or who have multiple accounts with varying karma. Having some kind of arbitrary karma threshold would be a turnoff IMHO.

Please don't do this. There are a number of reasons why legitimate users would need to use new / separate accounts just for job listings.

For example, some companies don't encourage participation in public discussion boards such as HN, but posting jobs on HN is fine.

This is the kind of subtlety we need people to tell us about. Thanks.

I don't think we'll impose a karma threshold. Browsing through this morning's thread, most of the posts are clearly legit. Punishing innocent posts (as would inevitably happen with a threshold) isn't justified unless the problem becomes critical, and it's not.

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