[dang]

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19799485 and marked it off-topic. You're welcome to post it to the "Who Wants to Be Hired" thread, though, which appears at the same time as "Who Is Hiring" every month.

[zerr]

Not OP, but regarding: "Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about something. It's off topic here."

So basically you're restricting any criticism. May I ask why did you arrive on such decision?

I personally find these kind of comments very useful, they are basically time-savers. This HN job board was unique because of this.

What alternative place do you suggest for such comments?

[dang]

Some people were using replies to the job ads as opportunities to attack the hiring organization and make it look bad. Since we have no way to know which of those are factual and justified vs. not, and since the who-is-hiring threads don't have space for a community process in which all the details get explored and readers get enough information, we decided the only fair thing to do was disallow this. It's too open to abuse.

For one thing, the job poster is in an impossible position, since they look bad if they don't answer the attack and bad if they do. For another, some people abuse voting in these threads to try to disadvantage their competitors [1], so it's probable that some were using comments too. And finally, even if the attacking comment is sincere (which I'm sure most were), a sincere "company treated me badly" story is still one-sided—and sometimes these things are highly misleading [2]. There are two sides to each story and to be fair one would need to hear both of them.

I completely get why and how you would find such comments useful, but unfortunately that's also exactly why they're open to abuse, and we don't want HN to be a place for that. It's better, albeit more boring, to stay on the safe side. I'd rather let some of the guilty go free than punish anyone innocent.

An alternative place for such comments is any other HN thread where they're on topic.

[1] We have ways of dealing with that, and take downvoting rights away from accounts that do it. But if anyone notices an unfairly downvoted job post, please email us at [e-mail] so we can look into it.

[2] I know this from moderating HN: people post the most godawful-sounding stories of how horribly we treated them, leaving out all the information that would explain why we really banned them, how many warnings we'd given them previously, and so on. The internet martyr narrative is an artistic genre.