alt Hacker NewsI Saw Your HN Comment
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Same with my open source projects and blog posts. I just woke up this morning to two spam messages:
> Hi Paul, I saw you run Claude Code on manpj,
> which is exactly who I built Tokenade for.
> Hi Paul, I read your Claude Code setup post,
> . . . That's exactly why I built Grafizum.
> It saddens me that what was once a rare joy and way to meet interesting people is now being abused to send cold emails.
The cold email pitch thing has always happened, but it’s getting worse. It also depends highly on the content of your posts, with the number of cold emails varying massively depending on how much your comments look like you’re in a position to benefit someone else.
I had to switch away from a named Hacker News account to pseudonymous handles a long time ago because the emails I was getting were becoming uncomfortably weird and personal. This was before the sharp 2026 increase in this article, so I missed that.
Even when I didn’t put my email in my HN profile I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down. These were stalker-ish in nature by virtue of having had to do enough internet research to find my email. The last one I received was weird enough that I started thinking before every comment about whether or not it might trigger an internet stalker, so I chose to switch accounts.
The 2026 increase is probably multi-factorial. There are more social media gurus than ever before pitching hustle culture and cold outreach. The number of people creating startup projects and hustles has also exploded. Every meetup, user group, and group chat is now full of people working on their “startup” which means they’re having Claude build the project while they prompt their phone during work. Everyone is realizing how hard it is to get users and traction, so their attention has shifted from writing the code to hustling for traction or finding. Meetups and community Discords feel risky because the second it becomes known that I have experience and possibly connections they might help I start getting DMs or people lining up to try to become faux-friendly after the meetup for networking purposes. It’s a weird time.
I've been having a similar problem. I have roughly the same amount of Karma here, and I used to get the occasional email about a comment and I would get kind of excited. I like engaging with people who have similar interests and as a rule I try and answer questions when people ask them of me.
Now I'm getting a lot of emails that ostensibly are asking for follow-ups but they really just want to pitch me a shitty low-effort browser extension or or trying to rope me into some kind of weird "consulting" gig that is pretty obviously a scam.
It makes me a little sad. Engaging with the community was something I always liked about HN and now its gotten to a point where I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.
> I’ve started sending short emails back and only if I don’t get a pitch back do I actually engage but I dislike feeling distrustful, treating people as guilty until proven innocent.
> but I can’t bring myself to take my email address down
A couple of things:
1: Use a different email address specifically for Hacker News. This is trivial if you own your own domain. (For example, I have a separate email address for my website.)
2: Set up an autoresponder with a short message, something like:
"I used to enjoy getting emails from the Hacker News community; I still do! But, due to the unreasonable number of product pitches, please:
1: Confirm that you're a real person, and that you wrote the words you sent to me.
2: Confirm that you're not trying to sell me something."
Then only engage based on the response.
> I know there is nothing HN can do about this, it’s not their fault
In today's world, there's a few ways HN could mitigate this, if they chose to. The simplest is to put email addresses (or the profile page itself) behind AI / scraping detection. (And I admit it's frustrating to have to ask for this.) They could also only show emails to logged in users with some karma.
The more complicated is for HN to proxy emails in a way similar to Craigslist. (And this would be going above and beyond the call of duty.) Users would need to be logged in, and have some karma, to send email; AND users who abuse it, (IE, send more than X cold emails over a period of Y hours) would be throttled.
Is also rampant in my case with jobs "offerings".
Is very sad because one of the best opportunities I have was directly from HN and was because I some little comment!
I'm looking for opportunities working on system-level stuff like RDBMS and before I know that being remote and from Colombia the chance was low but from HN and such was possible, now with all of this look like the chance is zero.
At least, I have my own mini-ISV doing ERP-like apps, but for people entering this will become brutal.
I've been getting these too. The first paragraph references something I actually wrote, so I read it thinking someone had a follow-up. Then I get to the pitch.
I still like hearing from people who found me through HN. It just sucks that my first instinct now is to skim to the bottom and see what they're selling.
I had an “Office Hours” link on my blog to do Google Meets with HN users. It was fun to catch up with strangers.
I had to take it down this month. We have entered a new era of social interaction on the internet.
From the chart, it looks like there is still a steady number of "regular emails", it's just that they get drowned by the noise (large increase in total incoming emails, percentage going down at similar rate points at stavle absolute number). Perhaps leverage the classifier you created to decide which to respond to?
Same thing for blog posts, yes, it've very sad.
I wonder what comes after. I'm thankful of my work colleagues who are tech-literate, and that the LLMs don't usually play online video-games, though bots and insidious surveillance abound there. It feels like we need to transition to some sort of hybrid and web-of-trust human interaction for specialized topics.
One interesting change for me is I used to have zero time to write personal emails, but due to AI making me a lot more time efficient, I now can and do write personal emails for things I’m just generally interested in, allowing me to create relationships outside my immediate professional or social sphere.
I've also gotten a lot of similar spam emails from people scraping popular GitHub projects to find contributors' emails, then referencing such and such work that you did on XYZ project.
Please stop. This is not an acceptable way to perform cold outreach.
Its incredibly depressing that LLMs have made so many facets of life strictly worse. Everything is absolutely inundated with slop
I'm mildly hopeful that when text watermarking comes in, we'll be able to automatically filter out all the LLM crap that gets generated currently. It feels like we're in the very early days of email becoming a tool used for mass spam, while we figure out exactly how to deal with that
Yes, I've definitely seen an uptick as well (as in, the baseline control reading was 0 emails per year.. I'm not very popular!)
It's always something cherry-picked out of an LLM's research into so-and-so's HN/GitHub/etc.
Most recently I got a cold email pitch referencing my "Who Wants To Be Hired" post from... 2024
> Hi Josh, saw your HN comment about [thing you said]. [Compliment.] I’m curious, [open-ended question]?
Why does every sales email talk like this? It doesn't seem like LLM accent, or maybe it's just a different LLM accent from the "programmer" one. It's just funny how instantly recognizable this is as a fake-chummy sales email even despite the brackets.
I posted a job ad here over year ago, and I continue to get REALLY BAD automated spam applying for jobs.
It's not even going as far as using an LLM. It's just a bad e-mail that is obviously sent en masse, where the sender obviously didn't read the job ad.
As far as I can tell, the people are using their real name for this. And sending the same spam multiple times with "nags".
I get that with any public-facing thing you will get a wide spectrum, and I'm picking on the people at the bottom of the spectrum ... but it still makes me a little sad. It would almost be more understandable if they used an LLM !! :-/ :-/
Are real life networks going to become even more popular as we move bravely into AI enshittification of online spaces? I can't even say "call me" anymore because I'll probably get a Grok bot or some other bullshit.
Yeah, it's almost interesting the sophisticated targeted spam I get now, almost definitely automated with llms. Most of it gets my details right except for one that thinks I'm a dentist.
On the other hand the amount of scans on my servers' ssh ports have dropped to about 1/4 since Ukraine started destroying Russian colos.
Does the world already have too much software if people have to resort to these “channels”?
I've got my own fair share of similar emails this year. I've replied to the only one that seemed human written (and of potential usefulness) to never hear back :D
For every 1 thing AI makes better, it ruins 100 things.
>"It’s like having an amplification attack pointed at you, someone sends 2-3 sentences (sometimes more)"
One light in the crisis is that cybersecurity isn't just in higher demand, but it's starting to be in demand for areas that previously didn't need it. It's not just systems that are under attack, but people.
Pivoting to security is a pretty safe option to not be out of a job these coming years
I'm hoping my current profile helps with this. Could go either way.
Second this, also coming from GitHub too. The nature of the messages has definitely changed. You can find skills out there for abusing HN for marketing purposes. Have pondered making pull requests to add the Guidelines as a way to slip in "don't do this, it breaks the rules" without needing to ask for those words to be merged explicitly.
I may remove my email and force them to go through my discord, but it sucks having to make outreach more difficult because tragedy of the commons.
Yea I have had the same thing and I immediately understood the issue.
We definitely need some way to name and shame such companies.
I had created a HN submission[0] when I had gotten one such message, it was around the rob pike situation (where he got E-mail from AI bots)
I do sure hope that something can happen in terms of naming and shaming them. Also people who are sending these AI generated messages have to realize that they just end up generating a large amount of hate for whoever they are sending the message and it is much better if they wish, to send human generated messages and in a limited manner rather than being a spam machine if they wish to be in the business for a long time.
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I really do this that we are in the last years of the Internet as we know it. I daily have interactions online with people who just seem like a frontend for an LLM. Nearly every piece of content I read feels written by an LLM, and every discussion or debate ends up feeling like pitting an LLM up against another LLM. Copy, paste, copy, paste. I mean, to an extent, even tech businesses and competition (e.g. SaaS) have become LLM vs LLM in many respects. It's disheartening to witness, especially as a creative. Either we migrate from screen space back into meat space, so that original thoughts and words are at least somewhat more verifiable, or the internet fundamentally changes to use some sort of proof-of-identity and proof-of-authorship. Ideally both. But tbqh, even something like the Nets in Ender's Game won't really work in the age of AI. Either way, the internet I grew up on seems further and further away, and folks seem okay with proliferating fake realities and fake conversations and fake thoughts. It's all fake. What are we doing?