I Am a Spammer. AMA (2009) | Hacker News Reader

I Am a Spammer. AMA (2009)

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53 pointsvincent_s33 comments

About 18 years ago, I was touring houses, and an owner had just stepped out for us. He had a nice, 3-screen setup in the basement, and there was no screen saver running. I looked at what was on the screen, and concluded that he was a professional spammer. I took away a couple of observations. First, it was still actual work. Second, he was making about as much money as I was, since I was shopping for houses in his price range. I’d just rather make money by creating something people use, instead of using people.

I would have taken his legit email and after some time subscribed him to a dozen goat porn sites. Man, I hate such people: they ruined the Internet for the rest of us, and the public steadily migrating from the open web or USENET to proprietary centralized closed systems is also in part because of them.

I don't see any reason to believe a word of this post. It's designed to pander to stereotypes, and people's preconceived notions of cybercrime. They say they dropped out of an Ivy league college, however their posts have some very embarrassing spelling, and punctuation errors. Flattering the intellectual vanity of Redditors is truly cringeworthy too. My idea of who the people are behind these enterprises is very different.

I think plenty of people "drop out of Ivy league college" simply because they got in and shouldn't have, and find it too difficult. You can apply that to any college level, actually. Add in people's refusal to admit failure and blame some other motivation instead, and well.. there you go.

That said, I don't buy it because of the breadth of experiences the author claims to have. I could see one or two of those things definitely making one rich, but the kind of person chasing that many things isn't suddenly relaxing on a boat.

So we’re just reposting old boring possibly fake reddit stuff now? Cool cool cool

I think the same every time I see reddit posts here. I come here to escape the constant reposts, fake and low quality posts, 0 value comments on Reddit. And then some users decide it's time to make HN into a reddit repost archive. As for the actual post, it sounds super fake to me, and I really hope it is.

If the author didn't retire, they're probably doing crypto scams these days.

(Can't judge if the story is made up or not - the boat is a flag, since sitting on a boat and doing "business" on the Internet seems unlikely in 2009; however, connectivity at port towns might have been usable)

Saying he thinks he’s a sociopath was the red flag telling me it’s fake. People making up stories on the internet love saying that.

fwiw idc :) I can understand that's an interesting question to ask, but after spending 10 minutes on a lengthy answer I realized we're still talking about a 13 year old post with (summary of my lengthy answer) vague-but-mostly-plausible info.

It's possible this post may be a significant embellishment of the truth, rather than being entirely true or made up.

He could well be a spammer, perhaps a small time one, that romanticises being the big-fish criminal living an implausible life on a boat in the Caribbean.

Perhaps the life of a spammer is more mundane, and those parts of his AMA are true, but he felt the need to jazz it up a bit.

Not sure I believe this post too much. Telling Redditors they're a smart bunch and describing yourself as a wolf and a sociopath make me think they're just a teenage redditor

Classic Reddit problem

A lot of stories on Reddit have a distinct style even. That makes me wonder if in the future some academics will recognise creative writing following that style as some kind of literary genre of its own, similar to how for example in design there is a particular design style that is recognised as “Bauhaus style” due to its ties to a German art school by the same name, which was operational for a decade in the early 1920s-1930s.

Not sure I can see art critics musing over whether a particular novel's prose was influenced by the structure of 15 year olds fantasising about what it would be like to have a boss and then outsmart them (the 'Antiwork' school of Redditry of the early 21st century) in quite the same way they might suggest architecture or typography is influenced by design principles taught by the Bauhaus school...

Then again, you'll inevitably see Reddit memes and copypastas and prevailing sentiments all over GPT type model outputs in certain niches, simply because it'll be so much of the input

There's also the part about the boat in the Caribbean.

You are reading reddit 2009 not 2022...

Most of the stuff mentioned on that AMA was before Aaron Swartz was "suicided" and Chairman Pao, and Conde Nast.

Reddit was a different place

Not sure if you're trolling or not but

- Aaron died in January of 2013

- Ellen Pao became CEO in 2014

Even in 2009 the internet was full of liars.

Ah, the good old time when gmail was good at filtering spam.

It still is. Have you looked into your Spam folder lately? The amount of junk it keeps out of my inbox and the accuracy at which it does it is astonishing.

It is indeed impressive, since filtering spam needs both: precision and recall

Yes, my spam folder is my inbox folder because gmail stopped being good at fighting spam.

In pursuit of a joke, you didn't actually answer the question: have you looked in the folder labeled "Spam" in Gmail?

You might be receiving more spam messages in your inbox than in the past, while Google continues to block 99.9% of spam messages sent. Both can be true, and the only way to tell would be to compare your Inbox to the Spam folder. Your experience might be worse without Google's performance being worse if the input stream itself is worse.

Or the vagueness and the jokes, that works too.

Making page 2 of HN with a Spammer's article from 2009 goes to show that good spam is evergreen. Like that SPAM in a can.

Thankfully, people now are much smarter in this regard and with the spam filters and everything.

People know better in terms of what's spam and even understand dark patterns in legitimate products.

_some people do._

but in exchange for that, we now have disinformation campaigns, alternative facts, ... . We need a spam filter for social/traditional media, maybe as a brain implant, cyberpunk style.

> even understand dark patterns in legitimate products

Many tech oriented people probably do but most non-technical people do not, and simply don't care.

You can put a popover that shows when you load the page the first time that asks "By browsing this website you agree that we own you body, mind and soul" and shows two buttons, one green "Accept all" and one gray "Show options", and most people will instinctively press the green "Accept all" button in order to get to the content faster.

That's why such agreement wouldn't be legally binding in a big part of the world. The users in turn know it's more or less safe to click "accept all" on a random website.

I think most click "accept all" because they simply don't give a fuck, not because they understand some judicial situation. Most (common) people don't understand most things on the internet, even less if it touches law-related stuff.

They don't give a fuck because they know no case when clicking "accept all" on a random website got someone in trouble.

I think these kinds of people have just gotten more sophisticated. How much money did Sky Mavis raise? How much money did the Luna guy walk away with?

An eon ago in tech years. The OP mentions "digg", for instance.

I would love to read an update.

From 2010

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