We're only being dishonest to get your attention. Join us!

In response to a story currently on the front page titled "FB is the Only Other Platform Used by 20% of College Students. Join Us!" [1]

Do you actually want to hire people who are going to fall for dishonest linkbait like that?

YC companies, I understand that you get to post job ads on HN and they automatically show up on the front page. Great. But please, show some respect to the people you are trying to recruit, and show some respect for this exclusive privilege PG gives you.

If you read the full post[1] you'll see that what they are referring to is the college students at a single university. At this university, apparently, 20% of students signed up at launch, and 30% of those use it daily. Making it more like 6% of students, at one university, who use their app. Probably a little more if you count weekly or monthly users. But still. That, in comparison to what the headline claims (20% of college students, everywhere) is ridiculously inaccurate.

And also, what about Google? Way, way more than 20% of college students use Gmail, Docs, etc. And what about things like Craigslist? It is even claimed that their app can tell you "exactly what you need to get done every day, with no input". No input is qualitatively different than "very little input, but it's really easy and quick."

You can, and should, do better. In addition to misleading people being a mean thing to do (even when effective), it doesn't do you any good to mislead your own future employees, anyway. Geez.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6269664

Hats off to that! Lots of the job postings on HN tend to make outlandish requests/offerings just because 'hey we got HN front page'. Some are downright shameful.

Also, in before the HN cabal muzzles this one.

Thanks for addressing this, I was wondering what was going on with that other post. The content did seem intriguing, but also a little shady at the same time.

FWIW this shows what it takes to get to the front page. There are a lot of interesting links in "new" right now but only stuff with a bit of negative tension gets boosted to the front page (fear & conspiracies work!) Disclaimer: I provided the crucial vote that boosted this here very thread.

The way I saw it was that they only operate at a few universities, and at the ones they do, they have 20% of the student body.

That being said, I agree it was disingenuous at the least and downright misleading at the worst.