Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrskitch | Hacker News Reader

Hey folks, Joel here, I'm the original maker behind browserless. You've seen us before on HN -- I'm very sorry for this situation.

We didn’t intend to SPAM you or send unsolicited emails, we just wanted to ask for feedback. Being an open-source/boostrapped service, feedback is really important for us, so that’s why we thought it might be a good idea to reach out to people directly. But now it's clear that that was a wrong decision. We stopped doing that and won’t do it again.

Sorry, it won’t happen again.

View on HN

Hey man, I believe most of us here know how hard it is to bootstrap something and lift it off the ground. From my side, I admire your product, and I admire the hell out of the fact that you've open sourced it. Which is why I would have totally been fine with just the first email, but the second one pushed it from "start-up founder struggling to get momentum" to "spammer that won't leave me alone". You were just too aggressive about it, but I do think the way you're handling it now is great.

There's one thing I'm honestly curious of, because I've seen this technique before, and it's not necessarily a question to you, but to anyone who might read this: do these pretend-personal emails actually work on anyone? Your product is targeted at users with a pretty high technical skillset, do you think they really believe you hand-wrote that email? Because I could smell the automation right away, even before I checked the message source and saw the HTML structure and the tracking image. It's fake, it feels fake, and to me it's actually worse than an openly-automated message, because it insults me by assuming I can't tell it's not sent by a human. I think perhaps tactics like these work better on less-technical people (though they still shouldn't be employed at all!)

Talked about this on another community, here’s a hilariously sad example of these fake “personal” emails

I was once gone from home for two days traveling with family. Two days. HBOMax sent me an email with this exact subject line (edit: I went and checked through my past emails before unsubscribing, they sent four emails with the subject line over the holidays):

“I can’t help but wonder why you aren’t watching” as an attempt to inform me about the latest series that was now on the platform.

Why? Because I have a life HBO that doesn’t involve you lol. I do other things with my time. I’m not addicted to television. Like come the hell on. I’m already a paying customer. Get out of here with this “why aren’t you wasting more of your time on our platform?” BS

I feel genuinely bad for whoever had to write that, and worse for whoever thought it was a good subject line for ad copy.

Those types of emails are usually a reminder to me to cancel whatever it is they're bitching about.

If I were the only person using it, yeah probably. As it is, with a household of other users, it’s staying for now but I still really enjoy thoroughly mocking HBO for it whenever the chance allows.

At least the emails are no more.

I used to order monthly coffee nespresso pods from a small-time online store. One time I put the items in the cart and then stepped away from the computer for a short bit only to return to an email with the subject line "Looks like you’ve forgotten something!" displaying the items in my shopping cart. I haven't ordered another thing since.

I can see how those ones may be effective, but they need to give me a coupon at the same time ...

There's a fine line between "you aren't using the product you paid for" and "we want to make noises about the choices you're making". Blurring that line doesn't help anybody, false pretenses makes it worse (because "oh they were just hustling, they aren't really surveilling your viewing habits").

Could have been resolved with a "unsubscribe from this email" link included on the first email.

Thanks for that -- we did have quite a few good conversations over emails. I did read each personally and respond to them. Didn't justify the means.

I don't understand how you can say "we didn't intend to... send unsolicited emails... " when this is literally what you did. It is very clear that you did actually intend to send unsolicited emails, because you sent unsolicited emails and have just given your reason for sending unsolicited emails. You are not being honest with yourself or others by saying this.

We didn't (intend to spam you) or (send unsolicited emails). Works? In dubio pro reo.

Meh. I don't think there's anything ambiguous about the fact that they consciously sent unsolicited emails for what they've admitted are essentially marketing purposes. That they didn't think there was anything wrong with this, and didn't consider that this would be viewed as spam, I'll concede. But that just makes them ignorant / naive / unethical (take your pick). I don't think this is a hanging offence, but I do think that their "apology" is at best an exercise in self-justification.

I guess now that you read through the comments, you learned this lesson. As someone who agree with the harsh ones, I appreciate your apology and being forthright about it.

For the future, you can utilize the tools given in GitHub - add a link and/or call-for-action in docs/README/release notes, pin an issue, Discussions.

Depending on your jurisdiction, status, and purpose, merely scraping and processing e-mail addresses associated with GH handles could be a regulatory violation without even sending anything. It's certainly against GH ToS. You'd do best in ensuring you wipe anything acquired without consent.

This kind of thing was seen differently in the 90s and early 00s. Times change.

I think you're being overly apologetic here. This entire discussion is an excessive amount of mindshare for receiving a single email or two. I regularly get email I don't care for. I deal with it. I don't think you're a bad person for sending 2 emails. This is the internet making a mountain out of a molehill. In a week, the pitchforks will move onto something else.

Hey man don't worry too much. It's usually just the vocal one percent, some of us get annoyed, some of us have the world seemingly fall down around us when a "spam" notice arrives.

I really don't like this apology.

> We didn’t intend to SPAM you or send unsolicited emails, we just wanted to ask for feedback

You _did_ want to send unsolicited emails, that's exactly what you did. You saying you didn't want to send spam, and hiding what you did intend to do behind "we didn't intend to spam you" is burying the lede.

> Being an open-source/boostrapped service,

Being bootstrapped is not an excuse for sending unsolicited marketing emails. Hiding behind being "open source" when you're actually a commercial offering with an open source repo is _again_ trying to hide what you did.

> But now it's clear that that was a wrong decision

It's only clear after someone called you out on HN and flagged your repository as abusing the terms of service?

> we just wanted to ask for feedback

Create a pinned issue with title "We ask for feedback"

Perfect apology

Reply on news.ycombinator.com