Correct! That was not clear. I hope you'll forgive the transgression as I'm juggling a few forms of communication at the moment--this HN submission came out of the blue.
I completely understand your perspective. The problem for companies who want to recruit great people is that most of them aren't looking for new a job (several studies put the percentage at around 80%). Therefore, companies are forced to reach out to those people to pique their interest. There's a subset of great companies who take the time to craft personalized, relevant emails to these people; there are some who even get their engineers to write the initial email. We want to work with these kinds of companies.
I'm not actively seeking new employment and am very happy at my current position. However, I am always (passively) interested in new opportunities, and am not going to ignore something awesome that falls in to my lap. A service like this is actually very valuable for someone like me.
That said, opt-in is the way to go. I definitely don't understand the seemingly contradictory point of view of them saying "we don't like recruiter spam either" and "we find ways for companies to send unsolicited requests".
So, I would fall under the categorization of "aren't looking for a new job", while at the same time don't agree with the opt-out (without an actual opt-out mechanism) nature of this service.
I completely understand your perspective. The problem for companies who want to recruit great people is that most of them aren't looking for new a job (several studies put the percentage at around 80%). Therefore, companies are forced to reach out to those people to pique their interest. There's a subset of great companies who take the time to craft personalized, relevant emails to these people; there are some who even get their engineers to write the initial email. We want to work with these kinds of companies.