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Comment by joshuajomiller | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand how companies can think this kind of privacy invading marketing can be effective. In which situation do they believe they are adding affinity for their product by scraping your email?

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It's not "companies" as a whole. It's a small department who comes up with these ideas and uses misleading, short-term metrics such as open rate or "cooking the books" by misattributing future revenue to their efforts ("this user who we spammed 3 years ago suddenly signed up - see, my marketing strategy is great, now give me a raise!") to justify their salaries. Their incentives are rarely correlated to those of the company, so every short-term trick that they can use to justify their salary is good even if it will be damaging to the company in the long term (by that time they'll already be on their next project with a successful achievement on their resume).

> It's not "companies" as a whole. It's a small department who comes up with these ideas

Ah yes, the "one bad nerd-apple" hypothesis.

The cost for the negative responses are close to zero while the benefit for positive replies is high. Usual spam/growth hack accounting.

Which means we need to substantially raise the cost for negative responses, to the point that a few negative responses completely outweighs any potential benefit from positive ones.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

> You may not use the API to download data or Content from GitHub for spamming purposes

Report each instance of spam to GitHub, and hopefully they'll terminate the account.

It's your public email address on GitHub (which you may choose to hide, if you prefer). It's also public what you starred on GitHub. This email is obnoxious and annoying, and it's possibly even against the law to sign people up without them explicitly consenting, but it's not "privacy invading".

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