> It saddens me that what was once a rare joy and way to meet interesting people is now being abused to send cold emails.

The cold email pitch thing has always happened, but it’s getting worse. It also depends highly on the content of your posts, with the number of cold emails varying massively depending on how much your comments look like you’re in a position to benefit someone else.

I had to switch away from a named Hacker News account to pseudonymous handles a long time ago because the emails I was getting were becoming uncomfortably weird and personal. This was before the sharp 2026 increase in this article, so I missed that.

Even when I didn’t put my email in my HN profile I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down. These were stalker-ish in nature by virtue of having had to do enough internet research to find my email. The last one I received was weird enough that I started thinking before every comment about whether or not it might trigger an internet stalker, so I chose to switch accounts.

The 2026 increase is probably multi-factorial. There are more social media gurus than ever before pitching hustle culture and cold outreach. The number of people creating startup projects and hustles has also exploded. Every meetup, user group, and group chat is now full of people working on their “startup” which means they’re having Claude build the project while they prompt their phone during work. Everyone is realizing how hard it is to get users and traction, so their attention has shifted from writing the code to hustling for traction or finding. Meetups and community Discords feel risky because the second it becomes known that I have experience and possibly connections they might help I start getting DMs or people lining up to try to become faux-friendly after the meetup for networking purposes. It’s a weird time.

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SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down

I'll just say that this is not new. Some decades ago I wrote a Letter to the Editor in my local paper about a local issue. As per their policy, it was published with my real name. I got several anonymous letters sent to my home about it, plain envelope, typed, no return address. None were out-and-out crazy but they all clearly were from people who had at least one or two loose screws and far too much time on their hands.

	▲	jmaw 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The physical vs. online privacy shift is interesting to me as someone who was growing up during the rise of the personal use of the internet. In those times we were warned never to post any personal information or names online. But our physical house addresses and phone numbers were all in the whitepages. Now we post so much personal info online, but whitepages are no longer a thing (although some voter registration systems have that data publicly available, or other for-profit companies that sell our scraped data)

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gobdovan 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What would you do in their place if you didn't have experience and possibly connections?

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Aurornis 3 days ago | parent [-]

True networking has always been about building a mutually beneficial relationship. That's hard, though. It requires being genuine and being able to offer real help.

So people instead try to shotgun their message to everyone. They hope someone will give them something helpful and don't care what all of the other recipients think.

So if you want success, try to be more on the mutually beneficial side and less on the spammer side.

	▲	gobdovan 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, it seems to me more clear that you're more against the types of messages you get, not just that you get messages. I think it's partly also because people fear rejection, so they put low effort into communication so they may say 'things didn't work out but didn't lose much either'. Usually the opposite is bad as well, I used to get enthused and reach to people with long messages and detailed questions about their work (before LLMs), only later figured out people are suspicious of too much effort too.