Comment by ibejoeb
2 hours ago
I just started getting a barrage of these last month. They're just scraping those threads. I don't think there's much to do about it. These aren't "real" hn folks that actually participate here.
2 hours ago
I just started getting a barrage of these last month. They're just scraping those threads. I don't think there's much to do about it. These aren't "real" hn folks that actually participate here.
That's because you all share your email addresses directly in your posts. I put my email address in my profile, and anyone genuinely interested is just one click away from getting my address from there or from my website which i also link to. Aside from a handful of exceptions I get no spam whatsoever, despite posting for years and not obscuring my address at all. And what I do get is most likely hand-written.
We have the technology to scrape your profile page too.
And there have been reports of people doing just that, scraping HN profiles to promote their new startup.
Of course we do. but it's not happening. Not yet anyways. Or not at scale. It's like the joke with the bear. I don't need to outrun the bear, I only need to outrun you.
But I didn't post this to gloat, just to point out that spammers are lazy. Of course if everyone moves their email into the profile then this will change, but even if everyone reading this thread does it, most others won't, so I trust that this will still work for some time.
1 reply →
The people scraping were too dumb to do it so far, but you just reminded them to start doing it.
Alrhough technically HN could detect bots opening tons of profiles and feed them wrong data.