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Comment by codeforafrica | Hacker News Reader

That's because you all share your email addresses directly in your posts. I put my email address in my profile, and anyone genuinely interested is just one click away from getting my address from there or from my website which i also link to. Aside from a handful of exceptions I get no spam whatsoever, despite posting for years and not obscuring my address at all. And what I do get is most likely hand-written.

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The people scraping were too dumb to do it so far, but you just reminded them to start doing it.

Alrhough technically HN could detect bots opening tons of profiles and feed them wrong data.

We have the technology to scrape your profile page too.

And there have been reports of people doing just that, scraping HN profiles to promote their new startup.

Of course we do. but it's not happening. Not yet anyways. Or not at scale. It's like the joke with the bear. I don't need to outrun the bear, I only need to outrun you.

But I didn't post this to gloat, just to point out that spammers are lazy. Of course if everyone moves their email into the profile then this will change, but even if everyone reading this thread does it, most others won't, so I trust that this will still work for some time.

saying spammers are lazy is about as ridiculous as saying africans are lazy. perhaps you are just not attractive as a target.

It is happening, within the last two months, by multiple recruiting startup services scraping/monitoring HN, and matching that up somehow with email addresses, in an automated way.

I've been getting a little bit from what I think must be people scraping my GitHub. (Or their OpenClaw agents electing to do so, or something.)

I use an specific email address for github and git commits and I can assure you people were scraping github for a while, even before AI.

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