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>> deliver newsletters to hundreds of thousands of campers per week > I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be This isn't spam. It's a newsletter subscription peo
by riffic 6y ago
>> deliver newsletters to hundreds of thousands of campers per week
> I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be
This isn't spam. It's a newsletter subscription people opt into by joining their website as a user. Users can opt-out of this specific newsletter in their FreeCodeCamp settings page and be fine and dandy afterwards.
Spam is something else entirely.
- Nextgrid 6y agoNewsletters are the modern spam. "Spam" as we used to know it is actually a solved problem nowadays on major e-mail providers with good spam filters. Regarding newsletters, the majority of those are opt-out (as opposed to opt-in) and the opt-out process is intentionally convoluted ("untick this checkbox if you would prefer not to subscribe to our newsletter"), so as far as I'm concerned it's indeed spam.
- riffic 6y agoSince we're talking specifically about the FreeCodeCamp newsletter, may I point you out to their privacy terms you agree to when you sign up (this is essentially a clickwrap, or "take it or leave it" contract): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/privacy-policy/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/privacy-policy/ > We'll ask you for your email address so you can use it to sign into freeCodeCamp, and so we can send you announcements and helpful programming-related links. Essentially, this is an "opt-in" process because you are opting to create your account and you agree with the site policies. Granted, I'm in no way a legal professional and I could be wrong about everything I said here. Corrections are welcome.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThis is the kind of thing I'm talking about. A FreeCodeCamp account presumably offers more functionality beyond just the newsletter, and the majority of people would sign up for that functionality and not the newsletter. Yet, there is no way to opt-out directly, and you have to go through extra steps to do so after the fact. This is also in breach of the GDPR which mandates that consent for non-essential data processing (marketing communications fall into that) should be opt-in (so pre-ticked checkboxes are already forbidden) and freely given (so there is no penalty for declining, you can’t refuse to open an account for them if they decline consent).
- asddubs 6y agoand it needs to be asked for seperately, i think you're right that this is in breach
- pmontra 6y agoI don't agree much with this assessment. I voluntarily subscribed some of the Cooper Press weekly newsletters https://cooperpress.com/publications/ https://cooperpress.com/publications/ They are definitely opt-in, not spam. I regularly unsubscribe newsletters I didn't opt-in, usually from unknown sources. Not many of them lately and the opt-out usually works. I remember a couple of times I had to send an email with a mention of GDPR in it. It worked. So "the majority" of newsletters are modern spam, not really.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI based my comment on what I see daily from non-technical people's inboxes. They are packed with mountains of various commercial newsletters and typically will get one or more of those per day. There is definitely a minority out there like yourself that knows how to manage it and only subscribes to a few select newsletters, for I think for the majority of people, newsletters are a net negative otherwise you wouldn't see people with thousands of unread emails and there wouldn't be so much hype around tools like Hey.
- the_resistence 6y agoBTW, the Cooper Press version for serverless is terrific. Among the best newsletters I subscribe to.
- Shorn 6y agoIt's not even just newsletters though. Every legitimate service (even Mozilla!) will spam you repeatedly with stuff irrelevant to why you gave them your email in the first place. I run a paid service that attempts to deal with exactly this problem - a key feature being to never think twice about giving out an email address. I recently implemented "one touch" blocking to minimize friction in the process: https://kopi-cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/x/IoCvKg https://kopi-cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/x/IoCvKg
- ddevault 6y agoThis is spam, and if you use it, you are spammer. This is a morally reprehensible project and anyone who uses it is an asshole.
- dang 6y agoCome on Drew, please don't post like this to HN. We've been through this before, and the rules don't stop applying when it's you who's commenting. How can I tell other users not to post denunciatory rhetoric if you're doing it regularly? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ddevault 6y agoWhat's wrong with "denunciatory rhetoric"? If someone makes a tool to enable spam, I'm going to denounce it, plain and simple. I'm not going to yield on this one. It is not reasonable to expect commenters to sit back and dish out praise for posts which are incompatible with their moral framework. But I guess this is just "growth hacking" in YCombinator doublespeak, it pays your bills so I can't really expect you to relate.
- mwcampbell 6y agoYou have a pattern of making over-the-top denunciations though. Maybe it's easier to see the problem with one of your other recent ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23943179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23943179 Do you seriously believe that everyone who uses C++, not necessarily by their own choice, is a bad programmer writing a bad program? Things are rarely that black and white.
- ddevault 6y agoIf you have a problem with that comment, bring it up in that thread.
- dang 6y agoIt kills curious conversation. No more flamebait please.
- deathanatos 6y agoI've received a lot of newsletters that I never asked to receive. It can be both.
- kehers 6y agoPlug: If anyone is looking for a way to use RSS for their newsletters instead of getting it in their inbox, see http://myrss.email/ http://myrss.email/
- quickthrower2 6y agoAh! I love it when I hope something exists then find it does.