It doesn’t feel like a startup forum anymore. When is the last time you’ve seen a post about improving a landing page? It’s more of a general tech forum now.

It was always an "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" forum (at least since I was first aware of it), but it grew out of a startup incubator, so the early focus was inevitable.

No, I would also say that it definitely used to be far more focused on starting a tech startup, with tech as a sideline, now it's the opposite.

I feel the shift started happening around the time product hunt got popular, so a couple of years before you joined.

You repeated what I said with different words. We're in agreement. And my original account was from 2010. I lurked long before that.

Two days ago....

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988065

But yeah, it got very little comments and they were mostly negative.

Oh, I missed that one. But the frontpage used to be full of posts like that.

Actually I am here for the brilliant community, comments and the content. Not even 1% of me cares about startups.

To anyone doing this; please stop. Cold-contact unsolicited outreach for sales is spam. It is not appreciated. The only thing worse than adding me to some newsletter are the ones who keep nagging when I don't reply.

I disagree with you there. There's definitely a way to do it right.

Copy-pasted templates are never appreciated, but hand-written, personalised outreach that considers the recipient's situation can go down well.

And unfortunately, people who hand write personalised outreach don't know if the recipient is like you or the parent poster.

In what way?

Article 4-11:

> Consent of the data subject means any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.

And 6-1:

> Processing shall be lawful only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies:

> the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes;

So whether consent is given or not depends on what people would write in their HN bio next to their email.

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think Googling a person's email address and contacting them in regards to something they posted on HN qualifies as "processing of personal data".

This is exactly what GDPR is for.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

> Examples of processing include:

> [..]

> sending promotional emails*;

> [..]

It's like Quora's pitches-masquerading-as-answers coming directly to you, I'd believe.