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Comment by thombles | Hacker News Reader

A low-risk way to dip your toes in is to email a blogger to say that you enjoyed their post or that you found it helpful. The message doesn’t have to have useful information in it, just be sincere. Per OP, often there won’t be a reply but also often it’s much appreciated - particularly by non-mainstream writers.

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I’ve been on the creator side with 1M+ followers and the amount of times someone has dropped a kind note like that can be counted on one hand. It’s such a breath of fresh air compared to the hate, criticizing and general unpleasantness that is so pervasive when dealing with online communities - even my own.

As a result, I make it a point to send notes to anyone if I’ve enjoyed their work, because I know how much its meant to me, that I hope to pass along those kind, appreciate feelings.

I'd be curious to hear more; I assume you are distinguishing a positive note (email etc) from a positive comment?

Yes, the comment sections are not something I dip into because it's a minefield. The baby gets thrown out with the toxic bath water in that instance but it's much better for mental health.

I sent Colin Furze a note and got back a nice reply. The dude has an insane number of followers, so it was surprising I got a reply.

I get them occasionally - maybe every couple of months or so - and I have nothing like that sort of following.

But I do have a 'say thanks' page on my blog rather than the more usual 'buy me a coffee'. Perhaps people feel less awkward doing it when it's invited! Anyway, I recommend it because the emails are always nice to receive.

https://www.robinlinacre.com/thanks/

I make it a point to 'like' and vote up any decent content because standup comedian Loui CK was convincing when he called for it citing effort and guts to look in the camera while others behind keyboards trash efforts for silly reasons.

A woman wrote a glowing review about a book of poetry my late grandfather wrote. After he died and I was combing the internet for references to him, I found her blog & post. I sent her an email sharing the news and to express how nice it was to read her words as I remembered him. She got back to me quickly. Turns out she had met him at some point in her youth through her mother. We ended up trading stories for a few days.

Whenever a stranger sends me a well-written - even if brief - email, it makes my day.

So every now and then, I spread some joy by sending an email to a complete stranger.

And I always add that I don’t expect a reply, so they don’t feel obligated to respond.

I do this often and it is something that everyone not only appreciates but sometimes their favorite email of that day.

Even a simple email like "I really like the design of your website/blog" will make their day.

I once complimented a blogger for composing a particularly eloquent sentence. My compliment was concise and sincere.

All I received in reply was “Thanks!”.

I was thrilled. I earned an exclamation point from an academic who would never deign to use such punctuation lightly.

I get dozens of cold emails and LI messages from sales/ recruiting a week. Only about one per year writes "I read your blog and liked your point about xyz." I always take that call. My LI (and HN) profile opens with my blog, so if they did 5 seconds of research they would find it.

I get those emails too but they’re always followed by “btw we sell so and so, do you got time for a demo?”

So when someone tells me they like my blog, i’m afraid to respond because they’ll just pitch me in response

Just this week, I got my first AI-automated one, following a pattern of "liked your X, especially Y".

I hope the people doing things like that realize that's awful for humanity, and they stop doing that.

The problem is it isn't really people doing that. All it takes is one person to set the process running and forget about it. Soon enough all exploitable systems are exploited if the cost of doing so is low enough.

And not only crime. I think it's going to be a lot of people trying to hustle via mass-automated fake-human interaction -- whether it's sales, influencing/advertising, recruiting, dating, or whatever.

And they're being encouraged towards that: even tech companies with reputations to lose are already aggressively offering to take over as someone goes to write an email or text, and proactively "summarizing" the one-to-one human communications of others. But there will actually be demand for one-to-many fake one-on-one interactions, in the hustle culture, and doing it to strangers will seem no worse than what they've already done: corrupting pre-existing interpersonal relationships.

I only have my email in my app, no social media or whatever. And received a lot of kind emails from users, issues they found, feature requests.

It is really something and I'm very grateful for their emails.

Oh I really enjoy it when I get random emails from people that have read my posts and have occasionally mailed maintainers of software projects that it is working perfectly for me. It's always a nice change of pace from bug reports.

I sometimes get emails and blog comments like this and always love them. One of my favorites was a comment last year, left on a 15 year old post about building my first gaming PC. I love how the comment said it was a "really fantastic build for the time". Something about "for the time" made me feel so retro :D

As a member of the younger generation, nobody really explained to me how powerful email contact actually is. Anyone who leaves an email somewhere for me to contact them gets a big kudos, anyone who also then replies to my email within 15 minutes is amazing and I always appreciate a direct line of communication.

I do wish IOS would support push mail for private mail servers.... You can't have everything I guess

Even lower risk is to email hn@ycombinator.com with duplicate posts or other issues on this site! It helps, and it gets you a bit over the fear of emailing. ;)

dang just does NOT reply though. I don't know what his beef is?

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but I've been blown away by the thoughtful responses I've gotten from dang. They don't always come quickly, but I would expect that given how crazy I assume that inbox is.

Nothing personally against Dang, you are right, usually replies are great, but I just have not received replies as of late.

Yeah, could be that the Mods are just really busy.

I suspect the emails are triaged quickly and there is a low-priority bucket which may or may not ever get a reply. In my experience if there is a clear call to action and addressing the issue will have any sort of meaningful impact, it's unusual to not get a reply.

At least it probably means they haven’t been replaced with LLMs…

Or they were running Fable :-)

> They don't always come quickly, but I would expect that given how crazy I assume that inbox is.

A wizard is never late or early, but arrives precisely when he means to.

He's replied to my emails before... /shrug

I've emailed dang before and definitely got a reply.

He has always replied to me, and has always been gracious, even when I felt a little too argumentative.

It’s hard being an hotheaded internet keyboard warrior like me when the moderators are going out of their way to remain polite and courteous when disagreeing.

This is why I share my email on my website and on my HN profile: it’s so much easier to see the human in 1:1 conversation.

He's not the only one behind the wheel. I've emailed at least 6 times in as many years and always got substantial replies.

I've always gotten timely replies too from dang, not sure why your experience is so different. Maybe an unlucky spam filter?

I don't often email the HN mods, but now and then I'll pitch an idea, and they respond. I usually end it with a big thank you to all of them, because they do thankless work, though I think most here on HN appreciate them for their work, this is an out of the norm community. :)

Also authors. Not the mega superstars of the world but even very bestselling novels as long as you show that you thought about it or actually did read the book

Yes!

I hope this feature of the internet is protected.

"just be sincere"

All emails I got so far from Nigeria claimed to have been sincere!

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