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> to the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world. Not good on him. It'
by sametmax 8y ago
> to the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.
Not good on him. It's an immoral business. I don't see why the hn community would endorse this just because it makes money.
If the emails were also a tool for privacy, decentralisation or some good objective behind it, i could see the pros and cons. But here it's all pros for him, and all cons for the rest of the world.
- samstave 8y agoYou 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...
- ajaygoel 8y agoAre 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.
- anyfoo 8y agoYour use cases sound very much like opt-in (and low volume) mailing lists, not cold list of contacts without opt in.
- sametmax 8y agoPlease 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.
- ajaygoel 8y agoajay AT wordzen DOT com
- JoeSmithson 8y agoI like how you obscured your email address from scrapers in replying to someone so that they could explicitly submit it to spam lists...
- jashmatthews 8y agoI can’t see wait for someone to put his email everywhere. “Did you mean ajay@...”
- ajaygoel 8y agoLooks 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%202019-02-20%2015.58.44.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8e0qpvnzn23opg/Screenshot%202019-...
- joaomacp 8y agoOh god...
- diminoten 8y agoI just always love rising to these de-anonymization bluffs: dimino@gmail.com. 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.
- EB66 8y agoIt'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.
- UncleMeat 8y agoAnd 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.
- diminoten 8y agoLiterally? I don't think so, no.
- tomnipotent 8y agoSure, 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.
- x0x0 8y agoYou'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...)
- gk1 8y agoAlso, shame on Indie Hackers for choosing to promote this.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TAForObvReasons 8y agoLike 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.
- stunt 8y agoYup! You would be surprised to see how many do vote or even comment without reading an article.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoThat 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
- supermw 8y agoThis 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.
- gridspy 8y agoYou're thinking of Crackers. Hackers are people who create things. http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
- supermw 8y agoI'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.
- BigChiefSmokem 8y agoThe 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.
- rhizome 8y agoI would reverse those as to which one is formal and which is informal.
- supermw 8y agoWhat 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.
- diminoten 8y agoYeah, but philosophically, what if he takes that immorally gained money, and does 10x the good? Is that immorally gained money immoral anymore?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago> Is that immorally gained money immoral anymore? Yes.
- diminoten 8y agoNo.
- Sebguer 8y agoWhy would you put the original comment as a question if you're being rhetorical and it's obvious people disagree with you?
- diminoten 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
- tomnipotent 8y agoThere's a reason we don't use the research from Josef Mengele.
- ceejayoz 8y agoThere 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_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#American_grant_of_imm...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]