About two weeks ago I posted a project I've been working on to Show HN[0], and I included an email address in the post itself, curious about what would happen. It received 0 votes and spent about 30 minutes on the Show page. Safe to conclude, a handful of people saw it at most and I need to work on my marketing.

I received no less than 20 automated low effort email about this post, telling me about how they had added my project to their website, and how they wanted to help me promote it. All I had to do was sign up for their service, create an account, verify that everything looked good on their prefilled out post, etc. I tried this for one of the emails to see what would happen, and at the very end, they say, oh, we have a queue of several hundred projects right now actually, but if you want to jump to the front it only costs $28, limited time offer, just for you!

I had one nice conversation with somebody otherwise, they were also pitching a sort of lead gen sales thing built on AI but more hand made? Unclear, but it was a cute back and forth. On the whole an interesting experiment, though not one I'll be repeating again anytime soon if I can help it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187882

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thunfischtoast 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

On a related note, and this existed before LLMs: fuck websites that claim to be free on the front, then make you jump several hoops like creating an account, only to reveal the price at the very end

	▲	cowlevel 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		the more it annoys people the more effective it probably is for getting people's money, because at least some people will get to the end and just be like "fine whatever you got me"

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

I had this same experience. I even got the “I’m curious…” question from the OP.

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

Same here. ShowHN[0] about a talking fish toy hobby project that got no traction here. But instead I got about a dozen E-mails from AI-bros offering to "boost my business" and "accelerate my AI growth" and "streamline my conversions" and similar rubbish. All spam, all LLM-generated bullshit. HN is probably my number one source of spam right now.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49740717

	▲	knuckleheads 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		hahah great project, the video had me laughing. and yes! exactly that for me. very silly now in retrospect, because they were just copy pasting the title of my project, and I can only imagine how it sounded when they were sending you stuff about a talking bass.

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nazma1997 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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robeym 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The amount of lead-gen or garbage marketing website emails I get is insane. We launched a partner program which is clearly for humans with existing consulting relationships in our industry, and yet lead gen AI agents flood the application submission. They always say they don't yet have existing relationships but will screen highly qualified leads for us. Very silly

	▲	reftrackingnote 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]