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Comment by pdntspa | Hacker News Reader

"Flexport is hiring" posts were popping up like weeds here on HN for a while. And they never allow comments, which I found to be highly suspicious.

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"We're hiring" ads from YC companies get special placement on the front page, and (AFAIK) they always have comments turned off. Nothing nefarious about that.

I know that, but I think these hiring posts should allow comments. It is suspicious to me that they don't.

If these companies are truly as great a place to work as they claim to be, then they should be able to very easily defend that in a comment thread. The silence from a lack of discussion on these hiring posts is deafeaning.

They’re not posts, they’re native ads.

Then they should allow native comments

Are there comment sections on linked in jobs? Indeed?

Of course not don't be silly

Neither of those are discussion sites.

The real issue is one of expectations: those kind of job ads are shoehorned into the site’s format, but then seem out of place because they don’t offer one of the most basic and central features that this site offers.

LinkedIn is as much a discussion site as this

corporate virtue signaling is not commentary

Presumably you can’t be referring to the constant stream of self-serving posts with all the substance of an MLM marketing pitch. So what have I missed about LinkedIn? Can you point me to an example of one of the discussions?

The rationale against YC job ads comments, FWIW: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299432>

Otherwise, HN moderates YC and YC-company stories less:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937269>

Can it be called rationale really? Saying job ads aren't intellectually interesting is an argument against job ads. Not for blocking comments. It was a business decision obviously.

I’ve been frequenting here for perhaps 5-6 years both lurking and posting and no one other company as far as I can tell has even remotely made as many “X is Hiring” posts as Flexport. Maybe Smarking. I bet it’s possible to pull numbers to prove me wrong but my memory at least says that Flexport is a specific outlier in terms of how many times they have posted vs other YC companies

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