if the recipient can't tell, does it matter?
If I lie to you but you can’t tell, is that ok?
Ethical Cold Outreach
21–30 of 72 posts
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#22I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.
> It's still not cool. Don't do it. So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
Not if it's bulk, but fine if it is actually a direct outreach with a hand-crafted email. The latter is appreciated, and the former is hated. It's usually easy to spot the difference, and a quick look at the headers will usually confirm whether it's from a bulk mailing service.
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#23The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers".
That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#24I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.
> It's still not cool. Don't do it. So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
> So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
If I don't know them, no, they may not.
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#25Interestingly, I wish there were the opposite of a do-not-email list for this kind of thing. I think it might actually be somewhat fun to get actually relevant email from companies working on interesting products in an extremely targeted way. Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for exampl…
Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for companies not to abuse your information, unless it's like 1-2 people and they're independently wealthy and the business is really more like a personal hobby.
I don't know how many times I've been to something like a niche clothing retailer and they ask me to join their mailing list for a discount and I think hey why not, I should come back in 6 months or a year and see what's new, maybe they'll let me know about their Labor Day sale. And of course they immediately proceed to email me 5 times a DAY because maybe I'm ready to shop now, when I wasn't at 2:00 pm. Unsubscribing only solves 20% of the problem because of course they subscribed me to 5 different daily lists and you need to unsubscribe separately. And, of course, if you don't do it quickly enough it will be 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 lists.
They're not human. They really can't help it.
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#26Interestingly, I wish there were the opposite of a do-not-email list for this kind of thing. I think it might actually be somewhat fun to get actually relevant email from companies working on interesting products in an extremely targeted way. Then companies could just go and grab a lead list from there, with some metadata, and if too many people report it as spam (you could use a private relay on the site, for exampl…
System Z is vaguely the read reply cards you would find in magazines. While I enjoyed the snail mail spammed materials, my parents were terrorized through the entire 90s by my abuse of those found in professional magazines like Computer Language.
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#27The comments on cold outreach on HN are always going to be negative. I assume the majority of us here are developers and go to insane lengths to block "spammers". That said, even YC (can't find the exact Dalton + Michael episode) encourages cold outreach. If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
> If it didn't work, people wouldn't still be doing it.
The same can be said for all sorts of activities, from the illegal and unethical to the mundane.
Although, to be fair, you're right. Which is why I actively make it my goal to make doing cold sales outreach more costly to the companies doing it than if they had done nothing at all. A BDR cold emailing me is a pretty good way to make sure your software does not get considered by my organization, and I'm very likely going to cost their privacy/compliance team more time than they spent contacting me unwantedly in the first place.
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the case in germany. Unless you give your explicit consent of course
I'm not German but I'd venture a guess that people still receive unsolicited outreach in Germany. The internet is global. A person sitting in Palo Alto, a shack in a rural village in Southeast Asia, etc. doesn't care about German law and is, in all but a few exceptional cases, beyond its reach in the real world.
People do breach laws, yes. I don’t understand your point
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
would you prefer that they advertised? Or is your life good enough to not need to learn about new offers?
How about if I'm interested in going out and getting something I look it up on my own time? Just don't tell me about it.
Congratulations, you just confirmed the need for SEO in all its forms.
Re: Ethical Cold Outreach
#30I sort of agree. But honesty if you're cold emailing me I don't super care if your a real human or not. It's still not cool. Don't do it.
> It's still not cool. Don't do it. So nobody is allowed to try to contact you about any product or service they genuinely think you might be interested in?
Correct. Unless a close personal friend