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Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

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Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#181

Post by metalliqaz »

k33n wrote: post #70
ls-a wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can't find any website for it. Are you sure it's not just some posting category on Bookface, YC's internal social network?

Might be this:

> Y Combinator is starting a blacklist for venture capitalists accused of sexual harassment: "'We don’t call it a blacklist, but that is essentially what is happening,” Kat Manalac, a partner at the influential start-up incubator Y Combinator, said of the blast email.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenfeldman/2017/07/17/todays-...

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#183

Post by woah »

polishdude20 wrote: post #179
keiferski wrote: post #45

I've spent a lot of my career marketing to developers, and spamming their GitHub account might be top 1 or 2 worst marketing tactics you can use. Cold emailing rarely works by itself. Cold emailing developers via emails you pulled from their GitHub accounts? At that point, you're actively harming your brand, and may as well just send them spam diet pill ads.

Wait why? That seems like the high effort and high specificity thing that I'd love to get. You searched for people who do what you need to have done, found me, looked at what I've worked on and determined I'd be a good fit and you reached out? That's the number one way to get me to want to work for you.

> You searched for people who do what you need to have done, found me, looked at what I've worked on and determined I'd be a good fit and you reached out? That's the number one way to get me to want to work for you.

No, their email templating tool finds an old throwaway repo you did 6 years ago, templates its name into a form email, and invites you to join a cattle call to be whiteboarded along with the rest of the shmucks

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#184

Post by insane_dreamer »

I get these types of emails daily -- never bothered to check whether they are YC or not as I don't read them; I can tell from the first sentence that it's not a company I know and am doing biz with and it goes directly into z-file. Most seem to have gotten my email address from LinkedIn, others from GH.

Side note but the trick I learned, at least with gMail is not to delete the email (which doesn't prevent you from getting new ones), or even reporting as spam (which may or may not work), but instead dragging it into the Promotions tab, into which all future emails from that email address will automatically go. Promotions tab then acts as your Trash.

The quickest way to get me to never do business with you is to send me spam.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#185

Post by devmor »

RandallBrown wrote: post #174
keiferski wrote: post #45

I've spent a lot of my career marketing to developers, and spamming their GitHub account might be top 1 or 2 worst marketing tactics you can use. Cold emailing rarely works by itself. Cold emailing developers via emails you pulled from their GitHub accounts? At that point, you're actively harming your brand, and may as well just send them spam diet pill ads.

If someone took the time to look through my GitHub contributions then pitched me with a job relevant to that work I would absolutely consider them. That's exactly the kind of recruiter I would like to work with. If it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.

> If it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.

It's not even that nice. They scrape emails and send cold calls to try to get you to purchase their services.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#186

Post by devmor »

WhatsName wrote: post #29

Doesn't YC have some code of conduct or legal/ethical guidelines? I would assume a legal and compliance department would have some major headache if documented cases of misconduct jeopardize later due diligence. I would not fund or aquire a company on the radar of national regulatory bodies for something as stupid as this.

Looking for ethics in an industry where a pluraility of founders are tied to Peter Thiel is a headscratchingly dense idea.

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#188

Post by input_sh »

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #120
input_sh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple regex filter will get rid of that. Now, if you use your own domain and have it configured as a catch-all, then you could do github@domain.tld.

I'm not saying I do this but if I were as smart as I think I am I would have given a Gmail example rather than the example you've given to avoid bots just looking up my website and starting to bypass my setup... ;) ;) ;) Also, spammers generally don't seem to be going to the effort to apply regex filters to the data they've scraped...

IF alias NOT ON allowList MOVE TO specialLittleFolder

By far the worst one is always going to be something generic like contact@, but my email provider is very good at filtering out those appropriately. :)

Re: Tell HN: YC companies scrape GitHub activity, send spam emails to users

#190

Post by adrianmsmith »

hedora wrote: post #164
retlehs wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By visiting the account and noticing that it still has activity long after the report.

How do you propose GH take action without risking taking down legitimate projects due to brigades of false reports?

GH literally say in a parent comment:

> we can (and do) take action against those accounts including banning the accounts

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