There's little enforcement happening in those threads anyway—they're too free-form, and manual intervention is too expensive. But adding a rule should hopefully still make a difference.
Maybe add the flag|vouch to the comments for those threads? Not entirely sure how it works (or if its possible), but it seems to work pretty well. I am guessing there is a filter for bad actors, even if not, the few that would be affected would maybe end up with positive comments from long aged accounts.
Thats a lot of maybes, but my impression of the flag|vouch feature is as a first step community moderation and guessing it works well? The job thread being jobs targeting the community, I would think it would as well, or at a minimum help.
I had a little side project I was working on a while ago that would ingest "Who's Hiring" posts every month through the HN API and analyze month to month when each one came and went, in order to call out the companies posting the (according to some heuristic) same ad for months and months, never actually hiring anyone. I was going to snarkily call the tool "Who's Not Hiring?"
Obviously a company -actually- hiring the same kind of person month after month would be a false positive, but I thought it might help to catch some of these companies abusing "Who's Hiring"
Good luck! I still wonder if you can't you sidestep the free-form and manual intervention stuff by giving those threads some shape via a monthly posting feature on ycombinator.com/jobs?
At the end of the day the challenges likely stem from "Who's hiring?" being just a thread with comments on a very spartan message board. I would have said you can solve these issues with an app or website, but you already have one, so it would be easier to just leverage that and then the sky is the limit–add any features you want!
ycombinator/jobs would presumably not be the right venue for an open job board but yes we could build software to better support Who Is Hiring threads. I've always resisted doing so but maybe we eventually will. I'm not sure how that would help with the ghosting problem though...
Would you be open to having people email if they send an application and get ghosted so that you can potentially take action on future hiring threads? (or stuff like the mentioned copy-pasted job posting that got caught in an argument) Since I know that emailing you is already the best way to ask for moderation help.
