> 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.

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svachalek 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Unfortunately, "confirm that you're a real person" is an obsolete approach for anyone that chooses to be deceptive. People want to keep raising the bar for the Turing test but for all practical purposes it's been far surpassed.

	▲	vanviegen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'd hope off-the-shelf agents would just refuse to do this?

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Arubis 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like the idea of a greylist. (Do these have a different name now that we shifted to allowlist/denylist?) I strongly suspect a lot of agents would just follow the instructions well enough to bypass and land in my inbox anyway.

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egorfine 3 days ago | parent [-]

> now that we shifted to

We didn't. Some did, but not all of us.

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LoganDark 3 days ago | parent [-]

I never really followed the cancel culture around certain computing terms. I still use the master branch in my personal repositories.

I wonder if it happened for anything other than master/slave, whitelist/blacklist? Nothing else seems to come to mind.

Imagine if people said airplanes need to stop saying retard because that's offensive! For the record, it means to pull the engines back down to idle before touchdown.

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graemep 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It reflects the dominance of American culture in computing.

Master is good example. It is not offensive word in either of the cultures I grew up in, and its strongest associations for me are “male teacher” and “highly skilled craftsman”. Blacklist sounds related to terms like blackballed.

The history if the US makes terms that even sound as though they are related to race or slavery a lot more sensitive.

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gwbas1c 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's because of IDE hard drives, you could have two on the same ribbon cable, named "master" and "slave."

Edit: I always assumed there was a technical reason for why IDE hard drives use "master" and "slave"; IE, if the master used older versions of the IDE protocol it could slow down the slave, or that the master had some priority on the bus. Specifically, if "1" and "2" or "primary" and "secondary" were designations instead, it might omit some kind of detail that was important to whoever picked those names.

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JaszHere 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

As non-US citizen this is also how I see it. Especially git's master seemed like such a weird change.

But on the other hand, main is shorter than master, and allowlist is self explanatory unlike whitelist, so personally I'm fine with these changes.

	▲	graemep 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Whitelist is self-explanatory, and it means you have a term for grey list. I also dislike American concerns getting special treatment and it comes with the background of the adoption of American English, which often loses meanings and distinctions.

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gwbas1c 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Language changes over time, and not just for PC reasons.

Keep in mind that language shifts really only work when (almost) everybody goes along with it. When the PC police try to change the language in a top-down manner (and then imply that those who don't agree are bigots), it tends to backfire.

	▲	egorfine 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> it tends to backfire Absolutely. I never cared about my default branch name, but once the PC people came, I made sure to never call it "main".

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cowlevel 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Complaining about "cancel culture" is not really any better than complaining about "whitelist"

	▲	LoganDark 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Why not? I felt it was a relevant example of the parent's point.

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everybodyknows 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 1: Use a different email address specifically for Hacker News. This is trivial if you own your own domain.

It's almost trivial if you have a Fastmail account. The feature is called "Aliases". Regrettably, there is a bit of excessive friction: multiple select+click required, downward through obscurely-named menu labels.

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nashashmi 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What is interesting is that anonymous users can look up user profile pages and see your about me message. There is absolutely so many ways to mitigate this open end point.