I always took those posts to be a form of (dark pattern) undisclosed advertisement masquerading as content offered as a perk to YC companies. The last thing those advertisers (and YC) want is comments that are similar to what you might read on glassdoor, criticizing the company, management or work culture.<p>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]<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294446" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27294446</a><p>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.<p>I.E. If today were your first visit to this site, would you recognize them specifically as promoted / sponsored content?
We as a community have trouble remaining courteous in normal posts. Allowing us to comment on hiring posts would be a nightmare for the moderators, as well as force them into a rock-and-hard-place scenario where moderating ill-behaved commenters leads to claims of bias and conspiracy.
Instagram is one of the few platforms that allows you to comment on ads. It's pretty interesting as the comments tend to be overwhelmingly negative.
Yes, and that's exactly why you can't comment on them. They're one of the payoffs for YC of running Hacker News and those posts historically sometimes became mudslinging contests instead of the recruitment post they were intended to be.
There was such a post recently with the title “<i>OlaClick (YC W21) first LaTam startup to raise from Facebook, Google; now hiring</i>”¹, which I thought was particularly sneaky, adding extra ad copy in the title of an impossible-to-criticize post.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31523852" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31523852</a>
The other question is "why can we comment on 'X wants to be hired' posts?"<p>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.
At a guess, such threads (which AFAIK are offered to YC companies only) would otherwise tend to degrade in to opine regarding compensation and the relative merits of various early-stage ventures in a sector plus function as a guaranteed time sink and PR nightmare for early stage businesses who could better focus their attentions elsewhere.
Maybe it could be optional.<p>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…<p>Like a sponsored Show HN
You can't really comment on job posts on the (open-access) "Who's Hiring" threads, either. Every month, the mods have to waste a bunch of time zapping people who want to debate the merits of different companies that post there. If there was an easy way, without changing the UX of the site (something that happens <i>very</i> rarely here) to eliminate comments on those threads, so all you could do is post job ads, HN would probably do that too.
Curious what an intellectually interesting comment on one of the “is hiring” posts look like?<p>The interview process aeems like the appropriate context for asking questions.<p>And the context in which it is productive for the company to answer them.<p>In this regard it is just like other job postings everywhere on the internet.
I've followed other forums where company representatives can post, and I think it takes a person with an exceptional skill set to handle the comments and discussions that result. It's not a "normal" skill that I'd expect of any normal job duty, even HR or PR. So I think the proscription of comments is necessary to avoid frightening those people away. I've seen otherwise competent and articulate people get baited into losing their composure or taking the low road. Forum interaction is, for better or worse, a performance art.<p>Anyway, somebody can always start a thread about the same company.
It's rarely a good idea mixing an anonymous party(us) with non-anonymous party (the company).<p>Reddit AMAs-- which I suppose are heavily moderated by the mods and up/down votes-- would be an outlier of this rule.
I often see problems with these postings. The link doesn't work, an error in the wording, etc, and a comment would be a nice way to tell them their post needs to be fixed somehow.
They can't. Comments would mostly be negative and likely open the whole place to libel claims.<p>Moreover, it couldn't even be offered as an optional thing given how bad it would look on any company that didn't.<p>What I would love is the ability for an Ad to be associated with a user account.
Things would get awkward for the more exploitative or otherwise "bad" companies. Having the top comment be "Your entire business model is a dystopian nightmare" would probably hurt some feelings.
Most of them aren't really hiring, but instead using the thread as covert advertisement for brand. In fact, HN largely exists in general to promote YC companies. Why would they allow comments on these threads, of which a large majority are likely to be negative, given this agenda?