Also, shame on Indie Hackers for choosing to promote this.

Like any community, the SV startup community falls for clickbait, and given the upvotes here it certainly drove traffic both to the IH site and to the topic company's site.

Yup! You would be surprised to see how many do vote or even comment without reading an article.

That can be perfectly valid.

I always check comments before reading unless it's a topic or site I generally trust. I end up reading things I wouldn't have from title alone, and not bothering with a lot of others.

e.g. In arriving in this topic I clearly see I dislike the spam business model, the method, and have no reason at all to read the article.

Yet I just commented and upvoted you, and flagged the submission. :p

You appear to be ignorant (meaning lacking of information, not 'stupid') of the history of social networks in the bay area:

Friendster

Hi5

Tagged

FB

MySpace <-- LA

All about email lists and spam.

ALL of them.

All of them did shady things, founded by spammers, etc...

Yeah, but philosophically, what if he takes that immorally gained money, and does 10x the good? Is that immorally gained money immoral anymore?

> Is that immorally gained money immoral anymore?

Yes.

No.

Why would you put the original comment as a question if you're being rhetorical and it's obvious people disagree with you?

There's a reason we don't use the research from Josef Mengele.

There is, but it's largely that his "research" was unscientific crap.

The US readily gave the equally brutal Japanese Unit 731 physicians immunity in exchange for their human experiment data on bioweapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#American_grant_of_imm...

Was unaware of Unit 731, thank you for the knowledge!

We use plenty of research from Nazi scientists, that's actually a horrible example, lol.

Maybe

This is Hackernews, as in whites, blacks, and gray hats.

Some people here make money through cool silicon valley startups that make for great success porn but don't forget that some people here also make money doing shady or even downright illegal things.

What we have in common in this community is our technology interests, not our morals or values. If you accept this fact, you can open your mind up to some great content and conversations.

I mean no one likes spam.. it's adding negative value to anyone other than lining spammers pockets

That's not something I see celebrated on hn not sure what you mean

> some people here also make money doing shady or even downright illegal things.

No thanks.

You're thinking of Crackers.

Hackers are people who create things.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

Words mean what the majority of people take them to mean. The fight for Hacker vs Cracker was lost well before the turn of the millennia.

What? No, words mean different things in different contexts. For example, to most people a "graph" means a thing with an x and y axis, but to computer scientists it means a thing with nodes and edges.

So yeah, in certain contexts hacker means someone who breaks into computers. In the context of this site (and MIT culture where the term came from) it means someone who draws on their creativity to make something cool.

A niche population vs the general population. When paths cross, who wins? For matters of communication, usually the general population.

The fight happened on multiple fronts. Yes, it was lost on cnn.com, but it wasn’t lost in the comment section of HN.

Do you mean to imply that prescriptivists are completely illegitimate?

I'm laughing at thinking about how "CrackerNews" might sound somewhat hilariously off color.

you crack me up ;-)

I'm not thinking of crackers.

Hackers do create things. Sometimes malicious things and sometimes things that offer no real benefit to society, but things all the same. In this definition you have to take the good with the bad.

The actual definition is in the dictionary and this is how it would be described in a legal sense as well.

hack·er

1.a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data. INFORMAL an enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user.

I would reverse those as to which one is formal and which is informal.

What year were you born? Because it's pretty clear there must be a generation of programmers who never grew up with the whole hacker mythos of the 90s or early 2000s. Some people's only experience with the word "hacker" is a person who makes cool nice things with code.

There was a time many ages ago when the word "hacker" was reserved only for the most dangerous and reckless breed of computer programmers.

I think you might have your timelines a bit reversed.

Afaik: From the 1960s to early-80s, it meant someone who creates. From the mid-80s to mid-00s, it meant someone who breaks into systems (driven by media reporting on FBI prosecution of the first network-enabled cyber crimes). From the mid-00s to now, it seems to be turning the corner again (co-mingled with the rise of maker culture).

Are you saying you've never received any benefit from an email you received that was part of a campaign? Like a discount to your favorite store? Not all uses are commercial, either. We have teachers who use it to communicate with all the parents of their students. A tennis club that emails out the week's upcoming schedule to all players. An HOA communicating with its residents.

It's a spam tool, plain and simple. The relevancy of that spam is entirely besides the point.

Once this app becomes large enough to get on Google's radar it'll likely be shut down.

The makers of spam tools often make lots of money in the beginning (e.g., XRumer blog spam), but once they get big, adjustments are made (e.g., CAPTCHA for blog spam) and the tools become ineffective/useless.

And some people really do buy health insurance from spam phone calls.

That doesn't make it not spam. Spam provides an overall negative value to my life, even if an individual message could conceivably be useful.

Your use cases sound very much like opt-in (and low volume) mailing lists, not cold list of contacts without opt in.

Please post your personnal email address in the next comment, so I submit it to a few campaigns. I'm sure you'll find benefit in some of them, and some might be even legit like your home town council shedule.

ajay AT wordzen DOT com

I like how you obscured your email address from scrapers in replying to someone so that they could explicitly submit it to spam lists...

I can’t see wait for someone to put his email everywhere. “Did you mean ajay@...”

Looks like someone has a lot of free time on his hands. I've received 4 emails I didn't sign up for in the last couple minutes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8e0qpvnzn23opg/Screenshot%202019-...

Case in point.

Not from me. My comment was tongue in chick, I'm not going to practice what I just criticized.

Which make it even more ironical.

Oh god...

This is a pointless straw man argument

I just always love rising to these de-anonymization bluffs: [email protected].

Let's put that good ol' spam filter to the test! I even operate under Inbox Zero, so rest assured I'll deal with every email the supposed mob is going to send me.

You're claiming that is the majority of your use?

If it's an HOA or small mailing list (obviously without DOI), then what is your click tracking functionality for? (I mean, the question answers itself...)

Sure, I get a lot of value from those emails. But I'd prefer the company that is sending them to be paying for the right to do so, and not circumventing the restrictions of a free email service.

I have no doubt Google will discover this and block the service, and we'll all be better off for it.

Literally? I don't think so, no.