Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

People largely treated that as obvious and overdue. The consensus was that public hiring threads have become a cheap lead source for AI-written outbound, low-grade recruiter spam, and scams. Several said this is now hitting both sides. Job seekers get fake opportunities, upsells, and creepy automated pitches. Employers who post jobs get flooded with generated applications and irrelevant sales emails. A few commenters said the quality drop is recent and sharp because models now personalize just enough to get a read, while others noted the basic pattern is old and AI mainly makes it cheaper and more frequent. The comments added two practical conclusions. First, the problem is not just annoyance. People described scammers trying to sell resume services, fake placement help, hackathon-style funnels, and offers to front for offshore actors using your identity, laptop, bank details, or Upwork account. Second, many now treat any public email in hiring threads as disposable. Some use aliases or temporary addresses, some push everything into filters, and some have stopped posting entirely because the thread no longer produces enough legitimate leads to justify the inbox damage. A smaller but clear minority said HN can still work better than other public channels if you are careful, but nobody argued the old open-email model is healthy.