10 ms·

This is a spam problem. Spam problems are easily solved by simply charging for attention. Job postings should pay me to view them, and I should pay job postings

This is a spam problem. Spam problems are easily solved by simply charging for attention. Job postings should pay me to view them, and I should pay job postings to apply to them. The only reason why ghost postings exist is because the marginal cost to the company is so incredibly low to do it. In demand people should get paid for their attention. What I don't understand is why are there no systems that actually implement this? Most likely because the user education problem of cryptocurrency wallets and the various UI/UX issues it presents, but there's no mainstream apps that I can think of that actually try this. Seems like it would work in dating apps, in advertising, in CRMs, in social networks of all types. Why hasn't it been done? My guess is because we've only solved half of the problem with crypto. We have the cheap value exchange, but we don't have identity figured out quite yet.

shultays 2y ago
(paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)
- airstrike 2y ago
  I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked. Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are tricky though.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most outsource the reporting to press agencies and (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually do sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at the prices you and I can afford. For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.
- immibis 2y ago
  Other way around. You should paypal them $0.01 if your reply is worth viewing. But Hacker News already has a cost to posting replies: you can only post a few (I think 5 replies every 4 hours) and although you can make more accounts, there's a limit to that too. So I know this was one of your top 5 in this 4-hour period.
  - esafak 2y ago
    Who would say their reply is not worth viewing?
    - immibis 2y ago
      Spammers. Even the most miniscule transaction cost means that sending spam costs more money than it makes.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Your account is being rate limited because your replies were repeatedly against the “rules”. Been there done that
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Morality aside, the logistics of this means you cannot literally PayPal someone 10 cents. The processing cost isn't worth transferring such a small amount. So the answer to this is to pay $5 and be able to see 50 replies. But what if you're unsure you want to even see that many replies? It's now a steep cost to consider.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    I suspect they want to do a side-channel payment system. So you pay X $100 or w/e and they increase your account by 96.50 or w/e it is after fees and X pocket that 96.50 into X's own bank account. Then when you have to pay 10 cents to somebody they move 10 cents in X's ledger while the 96.50 never moves between bank accounts. Eventually whoever's article you read (Y) will want to withdrawal what the ledger has but ideally at that point it will be a higher value like $100 so they'd get $96.50 of that but individually each reader only paid 10 cents.
ryanianian 2y ago
Recruiters and agents have been solving this problem for years. Firms hire a recruiter for jobs that they actively want to fill. Applicants hire a job agent. Those two meet. Very little incentive for spam in this relationship. The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins. Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for 20% of their effort. It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales when done through more automated means. I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.
- lazide 2y ago
  I’ve never heard of, or met, a job agent. More info?
  - airstrike 2y ago
    You ask someone to land you interviews and, if you get hired, you pay them a fee. Usually some (fat) percentage of your first couple paychecks.
    - lazide 2y ago
      I was asking for specific people.
- airstrike 2y ago
  The power dynamics between employee and employer are such that the employer ought to foot the bill for that on their own. Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job. The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter either. They just need an HR team that actually does anything other than protecting against liabilities and aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a practical joke of questionable taste.
  - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
NAHWheatCracker 2y ago
Micropayment systems don't work well because there are free options. Convincing people to pay any amount of money is incredibly hard. Would micropayments result higher quality? Maybe, but until you have a critical mass no one can really tell. Free options are more likely reach critical mass and dominate. Paid options thus die off, starved of attention.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Also, free applications systems are so common that I'd simply see any system that I, the applicant, needs to pay for as a scam. Much more different than a paid forum or news site. I pay $10 for those and I get exactly what on the site, even if the news updates slowly or the forum is empty. If I had to pay $100 for 10 applications and still get ghosted or auto rejected, I don't know what I'd do. That's just theft at that point.And the incentives for recruitment are just perverse at that point. Don't hire, just make a good job app.
- ceroxylon 2y ago
  It would be worth it to build a highly refined and moderated "free tier", with a paid option that is even better. From what I noticed during my last job hunt, all the big platforms could vet their submissions better.
danaris 2y ago
If we assume that a posting costs $1 in either direction, the $100 cost to a company of any significant size of posting a single job to 100 sites is pretty negligible. On the other hand, to someone who has no job, paying $100 to apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh—and there isn't the remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting contacted, let alone getting a job. Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income. Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in society) should reject such a solution.
- kthejoker2 2y ago
  I sympathize but totally disagree, if the $1 I paid guarantees: A) it is an actual job, with intent to hire now B) I will get an actual response, from a human, within a few days Then $100 is completely worth the time saved vs applying to ghost jobs.
  - danaris 2y ago
    The problem is, as I noted, spending $100 to post a completely bogus job 100 times is basically nothing to even a medium-sized company. The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come close to the guarantees you describe, you'll probably need to make the company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-enforced regulation/legislation. If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real, with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must get a timely, non-canned response?
  - 2y ago
numpad0 2y ago
I thought Indeed charge companies for posting and per applicant clicks? That combined with near 100% university graduate capture is what Japanese job market is like, where their current owner's corporate HQ resides. In that environment, the agency maximizes clicks and matches because that earns them most. Applicants are lured to maximize numbers of applications and qualifications(and failed matches), hiring companies go FOMO mode, hype up themselves and tighten up requirements. Everyone's paperclipping everything and producing clinically depressed graduates in big batches. It's a huge resource sink. Then of course fake posting problem isn't even remotely gets solved because the power structure builds up in the background in uncaptured dimensions, parallel to the system. You wouldn't want that.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>but we don't have identity figured out quite yet Can you explain further? ( btw, your overall analysis is spot on)

shultays 2y ago

(paypal me 0.1$ to see this reply)

airstrike 2y ago
I really wish that's how (a subset of) the internet worked. Not for replies, but for quality website access. Think newspapers and other primary sources of information. Fill up your browser tank and go visit these websites. The site then gets paid per view, or per duration of stay. Details are tricky though.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  In my opinion a big barrier to the success of such systems is that newspapers often aren't primary sources. Most outsource the reporting to press agencies and (increasingly) to social media. Press agencies usually do sell individual stories with primary reporting, but not at the prices you and I can afford. For mainstream press though, is it worth the pennies of a microtransaction to read someone's re-hashing of public records and social media posts? That is very much dependent on both the reader's personal expertise and the author's, and if they are mismatched the article becomes worthless to the reader. An article explaining what HN is would be illuminating to many, but entirely unworthy even of pennies to you and I.
immibis 2y ago
Other way around. You should paypal them $0.01 if your reply is worth viewing. But Hacker News already has a cost to posting replies: you can only post a few (I think 5 replies every 4 hours) and although you can make more accounts, there's a limit to that too. So I know this was one of your top 5 in this 4-hour period.
- esafak 2y ago
  Who would say their reply is not worth viewing?
  - immibis 2y ago
    Spammers. Even the most miniscule transaction cost means that sending spam costs more money than it makes.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Your account is being rate limited because your replies were repeatedly against the “rules”. Been there done that
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Morality aside, the logistics of this means you cannot literally PayPal someone 10 cents. The processing cost isn't worth transferring such a small amount. So the answer to this is to pay $5 and be able to see 50 replies. But what if you're unsure you want to even see that many replies? It's now a steep cost to consider.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  I suspect they want to do a side-channel payment system. So you pay X $100 or w/e and they increase your account by 96.50 or w/e it is after fees and X pocket that 96.50 into X's own bank account. Then when you have to pay 10 cents to somebody they move 10 cents in X's ledger while the 96.50 never moves between bank accounts. Eventually whoever's article you read (Y) will want to withdrawal what the ledger has but ideally at that point it will be a higher value like $100 so they'd get $96.50 of that but individually each reader only paid 10 cents.

ryanianian 2y ago

Recruiters and agents have been solving this problem for years. Firms hire a recruiter for jobs that they actively want to fill. Applicants hire a job agent. Those two meet. Very little incentive for spam in this relationship. The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins. Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for 20% of their effort. It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales when done through more automated means. I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.

lazide 2y ago
I’ve never heard of, or met, a job agent. More info?
- airstrike 2y ago
  You ask someone to land you interviews and, if you get hired, you pay them a fee. Usually some (fat) percentage of your first couple paychecks.
  - lazide 2y ago
    I was asking for specific people.
airstrike 2y ago
The power dynamics between employee and employer are such that the employer ought to foot the bill for that on their own. Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job. The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter either. They just need an HR team that actually does anything other than protecting against liabilities and aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a practical joke of questionable taste.
- 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

NAHWheatCracker 2y ago

Micropayment systems don't work well because there are free options. Convincing people to pay any amount of money is incredibly hard. Would micropayments result higher quality? Maybe, but until you have a critical mass no one can really tell. Free options are more likely reach critical mass and dominate. Paid options thus die off, starved of attention.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Also, free applications systems are so common that I'd simply see any system that I, the applicant, needs to pay for as a scam. Much more different than a paid forum or news site. I pay $10 for those and I get exactly what on the site, even if the news updates slowly or the forum is empty. If I had to pay $100 for 10 applications and still get ghosted or auto rejected, I don't know what I'd do. That's just theft at that point.And the incentives for recruitment are just perverse at that point. Don't hire, just make a good job app.
ceroxylon 2y ago
It would be worth it to build a highly refined and moderated "free tier", with a paid option that is even better. From what I noticed during my last job hunt, all the big platforms could vet their submissions better.

danaris 2y ago

If we assume that a posting costs $1 in either direction, the $100 cost to a company of any significant size of posting a single job to 100 sites is pretty negligible. On the other hand, to someone who has no job, paying $100 to apply to 100 jobs might be pretty harsh—and there isn't the remotest guarantee that this would actually result in getting contacted, let alone getting a job. Going one step further, paying that kind of money to apply also means you'd be expected to have a credit card or something similar. At the very least a bank account. And someone who's got excellent qualifications, but had a medical disaster cost them their previous job and home, and has been spending time on the streets, is going to have a very hard time maintaining a bank account or obtaining a credit card without an income. Basically, any time you make a proposal to "solve" the problems with hiring/job searching, you need to ask yourself, "Is this going to nontrivially exacerbate existing class divides?" If the answer is "yes", that's a) probably why it hasn't been done already, and b) why anyone with any compassion (or understanding of the long-term consequences of inequality in society) should reject such a solution.

kthejoker2 2y ago
I sympathize but totally disagree, if the $1 I paid guarantees: A) it is an actual job, with intent to hire now B) I will get an actual response, from a human, within a few days Then $100 is completely worth the time saved vs applying to ghost jobs.
- danaris 2y ago
  The problem is, as I noted, spending $100 to post a completely bogus job 100 times is basically nothing to even a medium-sized company. The asymmetry in power & wealth means that if you want the $1 spent by a job-seeker to even come close to the guarantees you describe, you'll probably need to make the company pay $100 per posting or more. And that would effectively require some pretty widespread and strictly-enforced regulation/legislation. If you're going to have to get that just for this middleman solution, why not go all the way and have the regulation mandate that any job that a company posts has to be real, with full intent to hire, and every single applicant must get a timely, non-canned response?
- 2y ago

numpad0 2y ago

I thought Indeed charge companies for posting and per applicant clicks? That combined with near 100% university graduate capture is what Japanese job market is like, where their current owner's corporate HQ resides. In that environment, the agency maximizes clicks and matches because that earns them most. Applicants are lured to maximize numbers of applications and qualifications(and failed matches), hiring companies go FOMO mode, hype up themselves and tighten up requirements. Everyone's paperclipping everything and producing clinically depressed graduates in big batches. It's a huge resource sink. Then of course fake posting problem isn't even remotely gets solved because the power structure builds up in the background in uncaptured dimensions, parallel to the system. You wouldn't want that.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>but we don't have identity figured out quite yet Can you explain further? ( btw, your overall analysis is spot on)