Remove YC “[company] is hiring” ads on HN (opens in new tab)

hah. put OneSignal in that batch as well.

Maybe they are hiring multiple engineers

Or Flexport

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 (:

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.

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

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 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.

> 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?

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

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.