I was wondering if HN has considered running a monthly "Who's looking for work", similar to the "Who's hiring" posts that are run every month.
Seems like this would be handy for small startups and talent to find each other, or maybe even would allow fellow HNers to help each other find a good fit via networking.
Or maybe this was already attempted with bad results?
Having it recur monthly, though, is another matter. Since there have been a lot of proposals for recurring threads lately, maybe I should share our thinking on this.
The bar for recurring threads on HN is high. People often suggest new ones, but I'm doubtful that most would improve the quality of the site. When in doubt, we will err on the side of not promoting discussions (even vibrant and interesting discussions) to regular features, because once ensconced, they will be hard to remove—and because predictable things inevitably get less interesting.
Tho whoishiring threads are a special case, because they compensate for the injunction against general job posts on HN.
I understand the feeling of "wouldn't it be cool if..." and the danger of being a party-pooper, so I'm not shutting the door on these ideas. But it's helpful to remember what HN is: a site for intellectual curiosity, i.e. interesting articles and discussions. Optimizing for that is pretty much our sole concern. From that you can derive a lot about what to say "yes" and "no" to.
People have always used HN for unofficial and informal purposes—that's wonderful! I'm not talking about any of that here—only about the core. For example, many of us have friends whom we somehow met because of HN—but that doesn't make HN a friend-matching service. (I originally wrote "friend-finder". We're not that either.)
So the default answer to "can we make a regular thread for ‘foo’" is "no", because a regular thread is a feature, and the default answer to new features is "no" unless ‘foo’ serves the core.
Edit: I'm going to demote this thread now since it isn't really on topic.