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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is combined with something I call "asymmetry blindness". They may say "but we send an single e-mail per month, this can't be bad".

We the users get a barrage of e-mails everyday because every marketing team is thinking we only get their mail, and it makes our lonely and cold mailbox merrier.

No, users are in constant "Tsunami warning!" mode and these teams are not helping.

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If they were sending just one per month I might actually read them occasionally. It's the three a day from the likes of aliexpress that get deleted without a second glance.

But yes, you're absolutely right - "no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood".

That marketing team only sends 1 email a month, but the 25 other marketing teams at the same company also only send 1 email a month.

Indeed. I received 28 unwanted emails of this kind in January so far (just counted), which is a bit more than once per day, despite quite avidly unsubscribing from this kind of emails. This month I had to unsubscribe from ChatGPT and GitHub emails of this kind too, although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently.

> although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently

Dark pattern. They know you'd spot immediate abuse , so they delay until you are likely to have forgotten whether you opted in.

>unsubscribe from ChatGPT emails

Really? I've never got a spam from them. Hell, I just searched and I'm not really seeing anything from them after the point where I signed up.

On Jan 11th I received "Easy self-care you can start today" advertising how ChatGPT can be used for meal planning or finding a local gym (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more wellness tips"), and on Jan 19th I received "Use ChatGPT to make life easier" advertising how ChatGPT can for example improve my coffee brewing skills (ending with "Ask ChatGPT for more ways to get it all done"). I certainly consider these "spam", and until recently didn’t receive such emails from them.

Did you by any chance report them to something like spamcop.net ?

Aggressive spamming => Aggressive reporting.

I'm pretty sure some people have performance metrics attached to their "newsletter".

Our subscription product costs less than expensive coffee. Unused RAM is wasted.

I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.

Again, no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood: if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable. Usually people already have their coffee-priced budget allocated to something. Like coffee.

(Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)

> if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable

Yes. This was the point.

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