To be the devil's advocate: that the community recognizes you as high quality (even in an unrelated field) IS in itself a signal that the job might be higher quality than a random new user's. A kind of reference from a trusted source.
I would disagree that karma is useful in this case. Given that there are no real standards for voting up or down, what quality, really, does karma measure? Popularity and account age, and maybe little more. Does it mean the same thing as having high karma on reddit, or having a popular youtube comment?
I would argue that it does, and for that reason, it's useless outside the context of sorting a comment thread. Certainly, it doesn't justify giving top rank to a job post.
1. "Andrew Ng forming brand new GPU machine learning team in Bay Area for Baidu, apply at []"
would rank way higher than
2. "I am a newly graduated MBA, I have a fantastic business idea but until the funding is lined up, looking for a co-founder to build MVP, 5% equity negotiable but we're taking a salary cut until Round A"?
I certainly upvote the better job ads and assumed everybody else did, and if you want an Idris research job, you'll probably be searching for the keyword rather than browsing top results.
It goes both way - I also enjoy reading the top posts because they indicate what the community thinks are the best jobs at the moment (and thus what's hot).
To be more meta, the "standard" for voting is the ranking algorithm, and should be designed to generally allow better comments to filter through regardless of their subject - including jobs. The specifics are left to the HN team but based on my year and a bit on this site, they seem to be optimizing for quality and be quite successful at it.
To answer your comparison above, I think (but never checked) that the key implementation difference is that some voters have more power than others, and/or the audience is more qualified on most subjects, than YouTube's (although the Haskell subreddit, the only one I'm relatively familiar with, has excellent upvoting and moderation habits imho). Nevertheless, in the one subject I'm relatively familiar with (classical music) it seems that better performances DO get ranked better on YouTube, so I'm not sure whether I am right to criticize YouTube either.
Edit - just had a thought - the OP might be correct in the case where there was just too much volume for anything past the first, say, 1/10th of job postings to be read - even with floating new posts to the top. It's relatively easy to check for this case by looking at the distribution of views, upvotes and flags per post.
> I certainly upvote the better job ads and assumed everybody else did, and if you want an Idris research job, you'll probably be searching for the keyword rather than browsing top results.
I never upvote or downvote job offers, and I think it might actually go the other way: people would downvote good job offers hoping that less people would see them, which means less competition.
I do think the first job deserves to rank higher, but not because of the karma of the account doing the posting. An interesting job would likely bubble up by its own merit. And arguably, fewer people would be qualified for that job than the latter, so there's more value in terms of hiring potential to not have the better jobs at the top of the list.
