alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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It's everywhere now, unfortunately. Ads, pitches, scammers now are targeting increasingly specific community information for LLM-based social engineering.
E.g. recently a club on whose board I am was target of a quite good phishing attack, using publicly available membership information.
I've started to write emails less polished in order to somehow signal that it's still a human writing it.
Interesting. I might've received my first one of these last week, from a legit-looking gmail address. They mentioned a comment I made a month ago and immediately asked for a 20-30 minute call next week. Definitely has the "please do free labor for me" smell to it, so I declined the call but offered to have a conversation over email. No response so far. Dunno.
>... I am probably just going to remove my email from my profile.
Did this two weeks ago for this exact reason.
> 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.
It makes me sad as well because as part of the younger generation who scrolls around on here, it feels as if AI is enshittifying the human aspects of what made internet good and I have no recourse of that because I was just born in this era.
Truly sad as I do wonder if I missed some era or was just at the end of its gate closing and I am witnessing the door close because too many roaches are entering from the door.
I just had an idea while writing this but I do wonder if something can be done: suppose that there could be a way of E-mail or some service where you enter your E-mail and it creates another E-mail which can act as an alias.
now for anybody who sends the message to alias, if they want the message to be delivered, (they need some level of human trust that they are human) and they would need to log-in from their HN account and they would need a specific amount of karma that you can set.
So example. you can decide that only people with 1000+ karma or 10k+ words on Hackernews can comment.
(One of my projects actually works on detecting the number of words and you have written 6,56,876 words on Hackernews for reference, so my point is that the filter can be technically possible for both karma/words whichever might be harder to fake, hey plus points if we can see the total number of words and run it through some AI scanner to detect if its AI/human for even more detection though I am unsure its overkill)
just thinking my thoughts out loud as I don't wish this community and its interactions to die, if not for myself then for the next generation just a few years down myself and I would prefer a world where if I invest a bit of time on HN then I can interact with you using E-mail without the problem of spam forcing you to remove your e-mail from the profile.
What do you think of the idea of project that I have thought of: Is it worth pursuing/any feedback?
Exactly, getting an email about an HN comment was always a little moment of joy in the past, now I immediately switch to a skeptical "what are they trying to sell me"-mode which I really don't like. I'll keep hoping for real interactions but I also fear I will just need to adapt to the "new normal".