5 ms·

I run a mid-sized job board (https://miserablyunemployed.com/ https://miserablyunemployed.com/) and I deal with a substantial amount of reports from users about

I run a mid-sized job board (https://miserablyunemployed.com/ https://miserablyunemployed.com/) and I deal with a substantial amount of reports from users about jobs that aren't accurate or don't exist. They get taken down immediately. The worse offenders are the companies that are using fake jobs to drive traffic to their sites. There is a special place in hell for those people. I wish that legal systems were better equipped to deal with bad actors that obey the letter of the law, but skirt ethical and moral boundaries. I think a lot of the worst things in the world would get fixed if we had some better way of dealing with them.

ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
How do you deal with false reports about bona fide jobs, but from malicious actors, such as competitors or trolls?
- ramijames 1mo ago
  I have a blacklist that filters them out at scrape-time.
  - ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
    I am not sure that makes any sense in the context of what I asked, and it also seems to imply that your business is based on scraping others' sites, which is a bad look. Also you chose a horrendous name for it. Holy crap, I would never sign up to a site with that name, not to look for actual work! Much less a bottom-feeding scraper bot! Most job boards try to keep sort of an upbeat or optimistic mood, at least!
    - ramijames 1mo ago
      You're right, my answer wasn't clear. I'm saying that I've identified a few places that actively produce job listings with the sole intent of getting you to sign up for their service. It's a dark pattern and I've banned them for it. As for the name: It was an intentional brand choice. I'm not trying to build "most job boards" and I'm sick of toxic positivity. Don't like the name? Use Indeed or LinkedIn instead. It's your choice. Lastly, your characterization of the site as a "bottom-feeding scraper bot" says more about how you view technology than it does about the site. By that measure, Google is the same thing as it goes out on a schedule, scrapes site for content, creates an index, and serves that to users who query. It's a one-to-one mapping.
em-bee 1mo ago
that is a good looking job board. except i am missing a filter for the type of work, like IT, software, marketing, design, etc. also filtering by industry would be nice. and part-time/contract options. there seems to be a remote filter, but it's a bit confusing how to activate that.
- ramijames 1mo ago
  I appreciate that, and the feedback. Will find some time over the weekend to add it. We already have these facets, I just don't expose them in the filters. Good call.
KellyCriterion 1mo ago
May I ask: Is this crawler based, I guess? (because you have some niche jobs/countries on there with some postings :-)
- ramijames 1mo ago
  Ya, I spent a month building a pretty complex scraper system that targets ~75-100K companies around the world and manually scrapes their career pages. It was just a fun thing for me to do and it morphed into something useful for others. I had never built a scraping system from the ground up and I really enjoyed it.
  - KellyCriterion 1mo ago
    Would you mind sharing some monetisation stats? :-) I have been on jobsearch lately and it was a very bad experience - it was so frustrating that I thought about building a modern/fresh jobsearch site for my region (EU), somehow crawler-powered but in the end I gave up because of all the scraping problems :-/
    - ramijames 1mo ago
      I've actually been thinking that I should be putting out a monthly report that shows costs, revenue, and profit margin. It's negative right now, but I'm hoping to turn it around within the next six months. The scraping problems were medium hard and at least I learned some cool stuff along the way. All in all, it's been a pretty fun experience building the whole thing.
      - KellyCriterion 1mo ago
        Have you thought of using the technology to make a spin off for branche-specific job boards and then looking to direct contact to some crops? (ie.g. "www.agriculture.jobs" as example) From my experience, lot of companies are willing to pay small amount of subscription if they have a "corp/niche specific" usergroup. (and this was actualy what my idea was about) And if you are branch specific, it worth to curate the site, have some customer calls etc. - this would give you two winners: Companies looking clearly only for one set of applicants, and applicants who can be sure that the site content is valid. Though, IIRC expeteer.com tried to deploy this "dating approach" onto job boards, but I do not know how they are doing these days

ButlerianJihad 1mo ago

How do you deal with false reports about bona fide jobs, but from malicious actors, such as competitors or trolls?

ramijames 1mo ago
I have a blacklist that filters them out at scrape-time.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
  I am not sure that makes any sense in the context of what I asked, and it also seems to imply that your business is based on scraping others' sites, which is a bad look. Also you chose a horrendous name for it. Holy crap, I would never sign up to a site with that name, not to look for actual work! Much less a bottom-feeding scraper bot! Most job boards try to keep sort of an upbeat or optimistic mood, at least!
  - ramijames 1mo ago
    You're right, my answer wasn't clear. I'm saying that I've identified a few places that actively produce job listings with the sole intent of getting you to sign up for their service. It's a dark pattern and I've banned them for it. As for the name: It was an intentional brand choice. I'm not trying to build "most job boards" and I'm sick of toxic positivity. Don't like the name? Use Indeed or LinkedIn instead. It's your choice. Lastly, your characterization of the site as a "bottom-feeding scraper bot" says more about how you view technology than it does about the site. By that measure, Google is the same thing as it goes out on a schedule, scrapes site for content, creates an index, and serves that to users who query. It's a one-to-one mapping.

em-bee 1mo ago

that is a good looking job board. except i am missing a filter for the type of work, like IT, software, marketing, design, etc. also filtering by industry would be nice. and part-time/contract options. there seems to be a remote filter, but it's a bit confusing how to activate that.

ramijames 1mo ago
I appreciate that, and the feedback. Will find some time over the weekend to add it. We already have these facets, I just don't expose them in the filters. Good call.

KellyCriterion 1mo ago

May I ask: Is this crawler based, I guess? (because you have some niche jobs/countries on there with some postings :-)

ramijames 1mo ago
Ya, I spent a month building a pretty complex scraper system that targets ~75-100K companies around the world and manually scrapes their career pages. It was just a fun thing for me to do and it morphed into something useful for others. I had never built a scraping system from the ground up and I really enjoyed it.
- KellyCriterion 1mo ago
  Would you mind sharing some monetisation stats? :-) I have been on jobsearch lately and it was a very bad experience - it was so frustrating that I thought about building a modern/fresh jobsearch site for my region (EU), somehow crawler-powered but in the end I gave up because of all the scraping problems :-/
  - ramijames 1mo ago
    I've actually been thinking that I should be putting out a monthly report that shows costs, revenue, and profit margin. It's negative right now, but I'm hoping to turn it around within the next six months. The scraping problems were medium hard and at least I learned some cool stuff along the way. All in all, it's been a pretty fun experience building the whole thing.
    - KellyCriterion 1mo ago
      Have you thought of using the technology to make a spin off for branche-specific job boards and then looking to direct contact to some crops? (ie.g. "www.agriculture.jobs" as example) From my experience, lot of companies are willing to pay small amount of subscription if they have a "corp/niche specific" usergroup. (and this was actualy what my idea was about) And if you are branch specific, it worth to curate the site, have some customer calls etc. - this would give you two winners: Companies looking clearly only for one set of applicants, and applicants who can be sure that the site content is valid. Though, IIRC expeteer.com tried to deploy this "dating approach" onto job boards, but I do not know how they are doing these days