Dev.to is scraping whoishiring posts to spam their platform | Hacker News Reader

Dev.to is scraping whoishiring posts to spam their platform

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31 pointsjeanlucas12 comments

I've emailed the sender and asked them to stop. If any of you continue to get these, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

In the future, it's best to notify us at hn@ycombinator.com about things like this, too. We only noticed this post by accident.

Thanks! Will do it.

I don’t like it, but I can see where they’re coming from. Because, technically, this would be a business opportunity; what if you get hired because you posted on their site?

So while this is definitely not the best way to get people on the platform, HN’s wording is vague enough where they don’t seem to be blatantly breaking the rules, just using some annoying community building tactics.

I think I would be cool if it was an hiring agency or if it was a startup in the beginning, but being a developer community... They know it better.

Tech startup's "the end justifies the means" motto right there, growth at all cost and lest I forget are you growing 20% month over month?, because you should to be valued as a unicorn.

Very true. But how do you protect easily scraped data that doesn't sit behind a portal/paywall and has value to somebody? Seems to be one of long-running mysteries of the internet.

I stand on the side of the scrapers

I stand on the side of the spam button in gmail.

If confirmed, a story like this make never upvote an official post from dev.to in the future, and make me less prone to upvote stories hosted in dev.to .

(I have 3 or 4 site in my personal list of never upvote.)

(And if there is a repeated abuse, the mods make get mad and ban the site.)

I only posted it here because I give dev.to the benefit of doubt. My guess is that the listing is a new business inside the community (has pricing) and they were experimenting

(I'm fine with a second chance. It depends if they repeat this next month, if they apology, ...)

Got me curious, why?

edit: btw, I did not post a job, but got spam to post job on their platform. If at least it was related to what I wanted, looks like they just wanted to mass mail.

Care to explain why? The scrapers in this case clearly violated HN's terms of contacting those who posted their email addresses.

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