First screen, captured 4 days ago. Open the video.

I saw your HN comment

What HN thinks

A community mourning the death of the friendly HN email, one 'I saw your comment… quick question' at a time.

LLM cold outreach ruins contact
Many report a surge of AI-generated pitches referencing their HN comments, Show HN posts or hiring-thread entries, turning a once-joyful channel into spam and pushing them to remove their emails.
Mitigate with aliases and filters
Suggestions include per-site email aliases, autoresponders, karma-gated or proxied contact, subject-line templates, and HN hiding emails from scrapers or anonymous users.
Retreat to smaller human communities
Others argue the open internet is being flooded with LLM content and conversation is moving to invite-only or strongly moderated spaces, though some doubt any space is safe.

Consensus: Nearly everyone agrees the volume of automated, LLM-written outreach has sharply increased and is eroding trust in genuine contact; there is no agreed fix.

Recommended in the comments

Lobsters ↗ (service): Suggested as a smaller HN-like community with an invite tree and anti-AI stance.
Tildes ↗ (service): Named as another human-centric community.
Fastmail (service): Its aliases feature makes a dedicated HN address easy.
Pangram (service): Reported as good enough for spotting AI-written text, though weak on short messages.
Hide My Email (service): One user reports zero spam using a relay address in their bio.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 3 days ago.

Points: 359
Comments: 292
Best rank: #1
Posted: 2026-11-09 by joshstrange
Category: Culture & society

hacker-news cold-emails llm-spam sales-pitches email

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Full page

Captured 4 days ago. Click for the whole screenshot.

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