Save $9, Here Are The TechCrunch Staff’s Email Addresses | Hacker News Reader

Save $9, Here Are The TechCrunch Staff’s Email Addresses

techcrunch.com

124 pointsPhilipA40 comments

"Well, unless AOL messes up my email inbox again:" I thought that was a joke at first, but apparently they are owned by AOL.

Are techcrunch employees required to use AOL Desktop? It looks the same as it did in 1998 http://daol.aol.com/software/aoldesktop97/

AOL badly needs to rebrand themselves. It seems like the company has changed and is very profitable in recent years.

They could offer, "the greatest thing in the world, by AOL", but it's not a company I would ever do business with, I don't have a logical reason for this.

Fun fact: "at one point, half of the CDs manufactured worldwide had AOL logos on them" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/

AOL employee here after they acquired gdgt.com last year.

Can confirm that we are not required to use AOL Desktop. Don't be ridiculous. Only thing we're required to use is the corporate VPN software.

It’s Convenient – With AOL Desktop you have access to your online world, all in one place.

Just use AOL keyword INBOX.

Yeah, AOL also owns HuffingtonPost. They've definitely shifted their focus to content.

I love the requirements, 266MHz processor, 1gb ram recommended. That processor speed makes me think it hasn't been updated really in nearly 20 years.

Wikipedia says it was released at the end of 2011.

Their target market for that application might have extraordinarily low-end computers (non-tech people who haven't bothered upgrading).

It looks like they still support Windows 98 users and computers with 32 MB of ram: http://daol.aol.com/software/90vr

For comparison, Chrome requires 512 MB minimum. I only have 4 windows open and it's using about 4 GB of memory, and this is a very light day.

"For comparison, Chrome requires 512 MB minimum. I only have 4 windows open and it's using about 4 GB of memory, and this is a very light day."

Good heavens. Below is top showing Iceweasel (Firefox in Debianspeak) with theverge, vox, fivethirtyeight, bbc news and theregister and an html5 video playing.

On an old i5 laptop with 3gb ram (64 bit OS).

      PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
    10272 keith     20   0 1673m 460m  29m R  67.2 16.1  16:23.65 iceweasel

About 30 tabs total, 3 profiles, 2 separate gmails, a few google documents, a couple of privacy extensions, lastpass, a few youtube videos paused. On a busy day I'll have twice that many tabs open, maybe more.

Chrome does a lot of caching when memory is available. I've got plenty of excess memory, especially when there are no virtual machines running, I'd rather chrome use it and be very fast than leave it unused.

Why is your CPU so high? The video? My CPU usage from chrome without a video play is 1%, and my processor is nothing special.

In Chrome, each tab is a separate process by the way, that accounts for some of the extra large usage. Top 5 Chrome tabs using between 200 MB and 350 MB of memory each, that does seem kind of excessive...

Ah, tabs.

I was confused by your window count. The cpu in Firefox spikes when I scroll a long window with lots of 'widgets' in it. On the very few occasions during testing of a pre-release version of (say) Ubuntu, that scrolling is also when I get kernel panics. Runs about 10%-15% most of time.

Doesn't alter the main fact: we demand more from our computers now than we did 15 years ago (RISC OS and then Win95 in my case)

If it were 20 years old I wouldn't expect to see the 1gb RAM recommendation. How much did a gig of RAM cost 20 years ago? I'm guessing about as much as a used Volkswagen :)

Try two new Volkswagens fully loaded. A quick search says it would cost about $28k, which is $45k today adjusted for inflation.

In other words, TC does not approve charging money for providing a set of useful email addresses (even if it's wrapped in a neat Bootstrap/Stripe gift box) and regards it as good old shady pro spammers. It leads to young startups sending mass emails and giving headache to everybody on their path. They prefer to share their email addresses with you openly and free of charge.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Why is this on ProductHunt?

"No subscription. No automatic renewal."

As if...

Is descending further down towards the bottom of the barrel to leech on more publicly available, easily harvested and/or less scarce items to sell at a markup a rising startup trend? It seems building novel value into a product is becoming less important to a segment of the startup industry. We now have selling of public parking spots, dinner reservations, and now email addresses. And while this model isn't new, there appears to be a popular reemergence of it.

I think it's that we just enjoy the spectacle of companies that seem like terrible ideas or based around an ethically questionable action. Nobody gets excited about "tech startup grows revenue to $100k on niche, hard to understand product and delays investor round to avoid dilution"

"easily harvested"

I get your point regarding some of the things you mention but having to pay $9 to save time guessing or tracking down email addresses doesn't seem like a bad deal.

TC doesn't seem opposed to PressFarm's success as a business. From the comments (Tsotsis is an editor at TC):

    Wouter Smet : ...with this post you just gifted Press Farm, apparently a super tiny company/web site, the exposure and traffic startups can only dream about....
    Alexia Tsotsis : Oh, yeah, you're right, we totally didn't think of that angle. Oops!

I don't see how you might conclude that "TC doesn't seem opposed to PressFarm's success as a business" based on that one line of comment.

I read Alexia's response as "We considered the possibility that this post will give PressFarm a much unwanted exposure, and yet we went ahead and published it anyway, just to save you the ice creams money."

This is just an email list? A more compelling product would connect a particular journalist with every story they've ever written, across all publications he/she's ever worked at. Then you could search articles by topic, type of product covered, sentiment towards particular vertical...etc and reach out only to the journalist that seem to have an interest in whatever story you're pitching.

"Seems like a lot of effort when you can just spam the whole list."

If you set up gmail filters correctly, there's really no reason why you shouldn't make your email address readily available.

Most email addresses of these guys are easily inferred. Some even have them in their Twitter bio like Anthony Ha. Not a big deal.

It's like stuffing envelopes. If you have to do 3 or 10 inefficiency doesn't matter that much. If you have to do 100 or 500 or 5000 all that extra time to guess name@ or name.last@ or nlast@ or n.last@ etc. is a big time waste. Paving to have the right address (even if some aren't correct because they've changed) is worth paying for.

If they are willing to do that, then I guess the age of email spam has passed.

Most TechCrunch writers gave their email freely if you asked. This list is the inevitable conclusion.

Spam filters have gotten very good.

does someone want to make a more comprehensive list?

That list is a list of all the authors at TechCrunch. I would not recommend e-mailing the administrative staff.

Maybe he means other sites.

Plain text? Isn't TC worried about spam?

Modern spam filters (like GMail) make me comfortable putting my email address in plain text all over the web. I never have a problem.

Is this a feeling "most" people share?

Look at the article URL. :)

I don't know that that applies anymore. I mean I used to remember using javascript and other hacks to wrap emails so the spam bots wouldn't get them, but that was ages ago and spam sorters have gotten a lot better. Gmails is nearly perfect.

It may be one of those things that we all assume we know for sure that just ain't so.

They most likely have very good spam filters already in place. They are receiving "tips" already constantly.

tips are supposed to go to tips@techcrunch.com but when I was there it was a total firehose you had to filter out into a folder and wade through all at once. You'd probably be okay emailing a writer directly if you have a good reason to think they rather than someone else should be receiving your pitch.

Word. I'll note for others that impressing a journo involves not looking up their most recent clips and figuring our how your topic is like those too, but rather understanding the needs of that particular writer in their particular beat and trying to add value for her while extracting some value of your own as well.

TechCrunch, being under the AOL umbrella, is using AOL's email systems. Not sure how good their spam filters are.

I'm using AOL's Project Phoenix with an @wow.com email address. I've seen a good amount of obvious spam flow past my spam box, so that oughta tell you enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com