I'd disagree for the following:

- It's useful when searching,

- doesn't make me think "official" so much as "recurrent" (and I realize I may be missing the expected connotations, but I'm just speaking from my perception as a many-year-HNer),

- and frankly, I DO think there is enough substance. It's a complement to the hiring threads that paint a more full picture on the state of our industry. Certainly no 300 post bonanzas like hiring, but I'd also add that large portions there are not necessarily substantive either.

I disagree as well. As the owner of a company who has had to lay people off in the past, I would love this thread to try to raise awareness of some talented people that are now on the market for new work.

The "Who is hiring?" posts are official threads? I always just assumed they were organic in nature.

They started out that way, but eventually we wrote software to post them. It's true the word 'official' is a bit heavy for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9635551

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Most discussions are best as one-offs and there isn't much substance in the Who's is Hiring threads either.

Maybe the team should think of a small UI change to distinguish official threads from non official ones instead of restricting a community from entering certain helpful meta data on a free form text field.

Please don't do special-purpose accounts here.

This is not a special purpose account. You can see that I've used it to comment on many threads.

Why don't you require real names while you're at it?