The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers".
That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
The same can be said for all sorts of activities, from the illegal and unethical to the mundane.
Although, to be fair, you're right. Which is why I actively make it my goal to make doing cold sales outreach more costly to the organizations doing it than if they had done nothing at all. A BDR cold emailing me is a pretty good way to make sure your software does not get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.
Interestingly, I wish there were the opposite of a do-not-email list for this kind of thing. I think it might actually be somewhat fun to get actually relevant email from companies working on interesting products in an extremely targeted way.
Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for example, like mailinator) you lose access. Good citizens stay. And charge a nominal fee to enforce the reputation system.
I'm sure this is one of those "congratulations you have reinvented system Z" problems
Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for companies not to abuse your information, unless it's like 1-2 people and they're independently wealthy and the business is really more like a personal hobby.
I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.
System Z is vaguely the read reply cards you would find in magazines. While I enjoyed the snail mail spammed materials, my parents were terrorized through the entire 90s by my abuse of those found in professional magazines like Computer Language.
You are basically just describing targeted advertising and it's already working like that, just not by email and probably more accurately than people putting themselves into buckets.
> Nobody wants to hear from your AI bot, least of all when it’s pretending to be you, laying it on thick.
The people who are doing this don't care about you though. They're playing a numbers game and if this form of "communication" proves to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, it would be an indication that the return realized exceeds the cost by a meaningful enough margin.
It's the same thing with most of the popular scams today. Many people look at them and wonder, "How did anyone fall for that?", but they still exist because they work on enough of the people to make them viable.
Not if it's bulk, but fine if it is actually a direct outreach with a hand-crafted email. The latter is appreciated, and the former is hated. It's usually easy to spot the difference, and a quick look at the headers will usually confirm whether it's from a bulk mailing service.
The problem is way more people are convinced (or just hoping, or just setting off an automated system that is even less discriminating than that) that I am interested in their product than I have inclination to check their pitch out, especially given their to-date 0% success rate.
I'm not German but I'd venture a guess that people still receive unsolicited outreach in Germany.
The internet is global. A person sitting in Palo Alto, a shack in a rural village in Southeast Asia, etc. doesn't care about German law and is, in all but a few exceptional cases, beyond its reach in the real world.
Exactly. How dare anyone contact him without first submitting a formal application for permission to exist in his inbox. Wait .. how dare I assume their gender .. wait, am I even allowed to comment ?
One of my favourite things to do with AI video pitch creator products is to put a paragraph of text into the first_name / company_name form fields on their "request a demo" function, to see how ridiculously fast their AI bot will read it out.
The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers".
That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
The same can be said for all sorts of activities, from the illegal and unethical to the mundane.
Although, to be fair, you're right. Which is why I actively make it my goal to make doing cold sales outreach more costly to the organizations doing it than if they had done nothing at all. A BDR cold emailing me is a pretty good way to make sure your software does not get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.
Interestingly, I wish there were the opposite of a do-not-email list for this kind of thing. I think it might actually be somewhat fun to get actually relevant email from companies working on interesting products in an extremely targeted way.
Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for example, like mailinator) you lose access. Good citizens stay. And charge a nominal fee to enforce the reputation system.
I'm sure this is one of those "congratulations you have reinvented system Z" problems
Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for companies not to abuse your information, unless it's like 1-2 people and they're independently wealthy and the business is really more like a personal hobby.
I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.
They're not human. They really can't help it.
System Z is vaguely the read reply cards you would find in magazines. While I enjoyed the snail mail spammed materials, my parents were terrorized through the entire 90s by my abuse of those found in professional magazines like Computer Language.
You are basically just describing targeted advertising and it's already working like that, just not by email and probably more accurately than people putting themselves into buckets.
> Nobody wants to hear from your AI bot, least of all when it’s pretending to be you, laying it on thick.
The people who are doing this don't care about you though. They're playing a numbers game and if this form of "communication" proves to be more than a flash-in-the-pan, it would be an indication that the return realized exceeds the cost by a meaningful enough margin.
It's the same thing with most of the popular scams today. Many people look at them and wonder, "How did anyone fall for that?", but they still exist because they work on enough of the people to make them viable.
I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.
> It's still not cool. Don't do it.
So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
> So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
If I don't know them, no, they may not.
Not if it's bulk, but fine if it is actually a direct outreach with a hand-crafted email. The latter is appreciated, and the former is hated. It's usually easy to spot the difference, and a quick look at the headers will usually confirm whether it's from a bulk mailing service.
My friends are. But then it's not cold.
The problem is way more people are convinced (or just hoping, or just setting off an automated system that is even less discriminating than that) that I am interested in their product than I have inclination to check their pitch out, especially given their to-date 0% success rate.
That is exactly my position.
That’s the case in germany. Unless you give your explicit consent of course
I'm not German but I'd venture a guess that people still receive unsolicited outreach in Germany.
The internet is global. A person sitting in Palo Alto, a shack in a rural village in Southeast Asia, etc. doesn't care about German law and is, in all but a few exceptional cases, beyond its reach in the real world.
Correct. They are quite a sensitive demographic when it comes to human contact.
Exactly. How dare anyone contact him without first submitting a formal application for permission to exist in his inbox. Wait .. how dare I assume their gender .. wait, am I even allowed to comment ?
Word.
would you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?
How about if I'm interested in going out and getting something I look it up on my own time? Just don't tell me about it.
One of my favourite things to do with AI video pitch creator products is to put a paragraph of text into the first_name / company_name form fields on their "request a demo" function, to see how ridiculously fast their AI bot will read it out.
if the recipient can't tell, does it matter?
If I lie to you but you can’t tell, is that ok?
>[Slop is] a tax on our daily allotment of mental energy. As Jane Friedman writes, we need relief from this constant epistemic vigilance.
Yeah, I can't wait to go back to being able to trust everything I read.
ah, the good old days where everything you needed to know was all signal no noise
This is true for "AI content" in general. People feel betrayed when they find out, and publishers try to hide it best they can.