I Saw Your HN Comment

Josh Strange describes how emails responding to his Hacker News comments have shifted from genuine conversation to product pitches. He once valued these messages for the people he met, hires he made, and ideas he discovered. Reviewing his inbox since 2013, he found no product pitches through 2021, then a rising share: 20% in 2022, 25% in 2023, 33% in 2024, 50% in 2025, and 88% of messages through November 6, 2026. The total volume also rose sharply. He attributes the change in part to LLMs, which make it easy to write tailored emails that reference a real comment and sound personal.

The problem, he argues, is not simply cold outreach but disguising a sales approach as sincere curiosity. Recipients may answer an open-ended question at length, only to learn that the sender is building a related product, represents a company, or wants a sales call. This wastes their time and makes genuine questions harder to trust. Strange now replies briefly and continues the conversation only if the other person does not pivot to a pitch, though he dislikes treating every contact with suspicion. He says transparent cold emails are fair, but deceptive “growth hacking” is unacceptable, and he will not use products promoted that way. Although his public email address has become a source of frustration, he will keep it available in hope of preserving some chance of meaningful connection.