Don't Make Job Referrals Public

I am currently in the job market, so I receive some recruiter emails. Recently, I started seeing a slightly different kind of message.

I posted in Hacker News' "Who wants to be hired?" thread with a short description of my background: physics, C++, CUDA, GPU programming, machine learning, and some recent work around LLM inference.

A little while later, several different people contacted me about the same Senior Software Engineer position. Their messages mentioned specific parts of my background, but they all led to the same company. Each included a different referral code.

The job ad says a successful referral pays $1,500. The payment only happens if the candidate is hired through that referral, so this is not a complaint about people being paid for every application.

The problem is what that incentive does when the referral program is public.