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Comment by porksoda | Hacker News Reader

How bad does it have to get before it stops working, I mean like phone a friend brittanica yellow pages bad? Quicker and more deeply we get there, the more effort and traction gets behind some breakout solution. Maybe it's just pure cynicism: burn it all.

Remember email spam? It got so bad, that we fixed it. I mean email has its issues and how but spam isn't one of them. I built a spam juggernaught in my day (got bills don't I :)) and I feel like I contributed a tiny bit to our almost-spamless latter days.

Progress! The world is on the march.

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You raise a good point. E-mail spam is mostly fixed, and, if I remember correctly, a relatively easy solution works good enough: ask users to mark spam as spam and e-mails that look similar[1] to spam would be banned.

Which got me thinking: surely that would work for websites too? Why not let people report low quality of sites directly to the search engine? Kagi lets you to ban sites you find unhelpful, but it doesn't downgrade websites similar to the one you've banned. I shan't speak of Google practices as we all know them by now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_spam_filtering

I find personal email to be almost useless for anything other than mailing lists and online shopping messages. I don't consider it fixed; we already left it to burn.

I use email constantly but I can’t tell you the last time I saw actual spam in my inbox

Sure, there are occasional unwanted marketing emails but those are easily dispatched with unsubscribe and/or inbox filters

Depends on your provider. My GMail is fine, but my much older Hotmail is a spam cesspool. It's so bad I barely check it anymore the last couple of years, despite having been able to keep that email address since something like 1996. As I had "exposed" that to some email farms I probably got into some really bad spammers lists which Microsoft seems unable to stop.

I gave up on my Hotmail completely quite recently for the same reason. It seemed to just stop filtering altogether. I'd recieve somewhere on the order of 50 spam emails to my main inbox a day. If anything, it filtered more email I did want than those I didn't. I haven't had the same issue with gmail.

Spam evolved. The filters catch most of the egregious kind, but our mailboxes are still flooded with the rest: marketing of legitimate companies, which you likely interacted with at some point, however briefly, and often mixed into transactional messages. This consists the majority of most people's inbox; I bet it's the case for you too.

That's not spam. Watch what you subscribe for and periodically unsubscribe, done.

I don't subscribe for anything of this kind, and if something somehow gets into my inbox, I report it as spam and then unsubscribe.

All that is very much spam. I'm never interested in marketing material from vendors. Doesn't stop them from padding every single e-mail with it.

Then it is spam, my bad. I get next to nothing somehow maybe once a week at most...

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