> with no way of knowing how valid their story actually is
there's a pretty simple way of knowing how valid people's stories are.
if one person says something, take it with a grain of salt. if multiple people say something, that's probably true. this is a social commenting platform. i've been here when you got hired for it, you've been doing this for ages. you know how this works.
> everyone with a grievance in the associated hash bucket will show up to complain about it
i highly doubt everyone who's ever applied to a company and been ghosted or had a weird interaction will dilligently check who's hiring every month to mention it over and over. again, this is supposed to be a website for people who value their time.
> it's not fair to make the job poster, who may just be a regular HN user without the slightest idea of what happened, pay for it
if you're posting a job for a company then you're part of the hiring team. you're not just some sort of clueless bystander. what you're advocating is a complete lack of ownership to what people are doing here. how do you post a job ad and not have "the slightest idea" about hiring practices? you're joking, right? if anything this would just make people create corporate accounts and post through those, which is better anyways, because at that point you know directly who you're dealing with. it's not like i'll see a job post by blubmaster5k and think "oh, they posted about a react library 7 months ago, must be a good job"
> they're typically in no position to air the other side of the story
that's not true. people in the hiring pipeline can easily address questions as to e.g. whether they replied to job applications. if they don't, that speaks for itself, and marks a junk post so people don't bother applying.
> I would need a reason to believe that's happening.
as long as you keep completely deleting any grievances and making it known far and wide that this is unwanted, people will not be posting about issues with companies. therefore you are deliberately blinding yourself to the problem and will never, as you say, "see a reason to believe that's happening". is this intended?
i'd even go further than that. a cursory look through who's hiring over the last few months shows a bunch of companies posting the same thing over and over. so i'd put the burden on proof on you to show that those companies post with intention of hiring rather than just harvesting cvs to keep their current employees in check and/or just sell the data on to spammers. your counter argument to this could be "but people would complain" - no they wouldn't, not if these are the rules you set out for who's hiring.