jbsimpson

I think they were making a point that they were going to clarify these things but didn't want to get involved in arguing online.

I also wouldn't exactly call that a rant, I call that a bullet-point explanation of their logic. Personally I'm grateful to them for clarifying things. Until that point I had multiple people making comments about how I couldn't tell a bot from a human.

Thanks for commenting and clarifying things :)

Thank-you for the insightful contribution.

Oh I see, that's probably fair enough - I did toy with the idea of leaving a message at the end clarifying that I had received no money for writing it, but ended up leaving it out.

I didn't edit the names out when they were mentioned in the email but I did try to avoid gratuitous references to them in my main content.

I'm really used to getting those bot emails by now, the personal greeting (left out of my post for brevity), speed of getting back to me, and conversation I had with the fellow after made it fairly clear it wasn't a mass spammed message.

To be honest, the hosting provider I use is so cheap I don't think there was too much loyalty to begin with.

Can you tell me how I can get people to pay me to write articles on my personal blog? So far I've mainly written about my interests in machine learning and science, but as a graduate researcher an extra source of income would be great /s

I'm guessing that they looked up the domain, saw the email associated with it and then emailed me directly.

I thought it a rather novel strategy and an interesting experience.

'spammer buying votes'

Wait, so posting your own writing counts as 'buying votes'? It was something I enjoyed writing, apparently to be pure I should never tell others when I write something?

'comment karma farmers' The intense bitterness makes it seem that you have an irrational devotion to who gets your imaginary internet karma.

It wasn't, I emailed him back right away and we ended up exchanging multiple emails in a very brief period of time. Either that or chat bots are smarter than most humans these days.

Nope, I ended up exchanging a few emails with the guy about this strategy - it was not a bot. I removed identifying info to shorten the emails but it was quite obviously not a mass email.