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Applied and had a lovely chat with Ev Kontsevoy. Was told I'd hear back from their CTO, even was cc'ed on an intro email.....and that was it. Kind of disappointed to be ghosted like that, as the stack looked to be something I'd like to work with.



We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17904070 and marked it off-topic.

This is the sort of reply that we're asking people not to post in these threads—see the root text. I appreciate that you were polite about it, and have no reason to doubt what you said, but we have no way of adjudicating which posts are fair and true vs. not.

Comments on a job ad are not a context in which both sides of a story can be aired. The companies aren't free to respond, the employees posting the jobs typically have no idea of what happened, and so on. Even if they could respond, the resulting threads would often become long and off-topic. Worse, they would be vulnerable to abuse. I'm sure you wouldn't do that, but others unfortunately would.

These are all issues that we can and do deal with moderating in the general forum, but Who Is Hiring threads aren't the general forum—they're a job board planted into HN like an embedded DSL, and statements that are valid in the general language don't all work here.


> we have no way of adjudicating which posts are fair and true vs. not.

You routinely bring this up as if it's somehow necessary but have never demonstrated why, only resorting to "it's better for the community", without, again, any reasoning or discussion (that you don't immediately shut down) behind it.

> Comments on a job ad are not a context in which both sides of a story can be aired.

Even if true, which is debatable, that's not necessarily desirable.

> the resulting threads would often become long and off-topic. Worse, they would be vulnerable to abuse. I'm sure you wouldn't do that, but others unfortunately would.

Is this demonstrable, or just speculation? Where are the early examples of this occurring?

> These are all issues that we can and do deal with moderating in the general forum, but Who Is Hiring threads aren't the general forum—they're a job board planted into HN like an embedded DSL, and statements that are valid in the general language don't all work here.

As an argument-by-analogy, this suffers from being potentially misleading. However, since you resort to a technical analogy, why not resort to a technical solution?

Berating users for not being able to read your mind [1] and behaving otherwise reasonably for the forum is unfair.

If you feel you need to stifle conversation on this thread, then prohibit it outright. Technically.

[1] and, no, the "instructions" at the top are not sufficient, since they are, in effect, too hidden, too exceptional, and include no reasoning for what seems to be an arbitrary rule for a "DSL" you've created.


Do all the downvotes mean people merely disagree? Surely none of my points are so obviously invalid as to warrant silent dismissal.

After all, if there had been a blog post (or other similar discussion topic) that could pointed to, no (repeated) explanation by moderators would be necessary. The discussion would already have occurred, and the reasoning would be clear enough for anyone interested to examine it.

Or is it merely an expression of disapproval at challenging an HN moderator, or, more subtly, the interests of those posting to this job-board-within-HN?




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