>> deliver newsletters to hundreds of thousands of campers per week
> I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be
This isn't spam. It's a newsletter subscription people opt into by joining their website as a user. Users can opt-out of this specific newsletter in their FreeCodeCamp settings page and be fine and dandy afterwards.
Come on Drew, please don't post like this to HN. We've been through this before, and the rules don't stop applying when it's you who's commenting. How can I tell other users not to post denunciatory rhetoric if you're doing it regularly?
What's wrong with "denunciatory rhetoric"? If someone makes a tool to enable spam, I'm going to denounce it, plain and simple. I'm not going to yield on this one. It is not reasonable to expect commenters to sit back and dish out praise for posts which are incompatible with their moral framework. But I guess this is just "growth hacking" in YCombinator doublespeak, it pays your bills so I can't really expect you to relate.
Do you seriously believe that everyone who uses C++, not necessarily by their own choice, is a bad programmer writing a bad program? Things are rarely that black and white.
This isn't flamebait. This is a statement of my opinion, and a pushing back against wrongdoing. I intend to keep pushing back against wrongdoing, or else it'll keep happening.
To be clear, are you saying that any email subscription service (e.g., newsletters, activity notifications) is immoral/evil, even with enthusiastic informed consent, double-opt-in, 1-click unsubscribe support, and any other measures to ensure the sending of email is welcomed by the user and no messages are sent after such time as they become unwelcome; even with all that, is there no conceivable legitimate, moral, non-evil use for this product?
For instance, a project I help to operate is a platform to help surgeons find anaesthetists for their surgeries, sometimes for emergencies at very short notice. It currently sends a few hundred emails a day, and everyone who receives them absolutely wants and needs to receive them. If the project keeps growing, the email volume could grow into the thousands per day. Is this morally reprehensible?
>To be clear, are you saying that any email subscription service (e.g., newsletters, activity notifications) is immoral/evil, even with enthusiastic informed consent, double-opt-in, 1-click unsubscribe support, and any other measures to ensure the sending of email is welcomed by the user and no messages are sent after such time as they become unwelcome
This project is not described by your summary. A project which could be described as such would not be immoral. But that's not what this is: this is a tool for enabling spam distribution.
> I intend to keep pushing back against wrongdoing, or else it'll keep happening
Given that it's not obvious why this project is overwhelmingly more suited to spam than legit the subscribed/responsible email distribution of the kind I described, you're not doing anything effective to keep "it" from happening, and you're only succeeding in yukking up HN.
Newsletters are the modern spam. "Spam" as we used to know it is actually a solved problem nowadays on major e-mail providers with good spam filters.
Regarding newsletters, the majority of those are opt-out (as opposed to opt-in) and the opt-out process is intentionally convoluted ("untick this checkbox if you would prefer not to subscribe to our newsletter"), so as far as I'm concerned it's indeed spam.
Since we're talking specifically about the FreeCodeCamp newsletter, may I point you out to their privacy terms you agree to when you sign up (this is essentially a clickwrap, or "take it or leave it" contract):
> We'll ask you for your email address so you can use it to sign into freeCodeCamp, and so we can send you announcements and helpful programming-related links.
Essentially, this is an "opt-in" process because you are opting to create your account and you agree with the site policies.
Granted, I'm in no way a legal professional and I could be wrong about everything I said here. Corrections are welcome.
A FreeCodeCamp account presumably offers more functionality beyond just the newsletter, and the majority of people would sign up for that functionality and not the newsletter.
Yet, there is no way to opt-out directly, and you have to go through extra steps to do so after the fact.
This is also in breach of the GDPR which mandates that consent for non-essential data processing (marketing communications fall into that) should be opt-in (so pre-ticked checkboxes are already forbidden) and freely given (so there is no penalty for declining, you can’t refuse to open an account for them if they decline consent).
It's not even just newsletters though. Every legitimate service (even Mozilla!) will spam you repeatedly with stuff irrelevant to why you gave them your email in the first place.
I run a paid service that attempts to deal with exactly this problem - a key feature being to never think twice about giving out an email address.
I regularly unsubscribe newsletters I didn't opt-in, usually from unknown sources. Not many of them lately and the opt-out usually works. I remember a couple of times I had to send an email with a mention of GDPR in it. It worked.
So "the majority" of newsletters are modern spam, not really.
I based my comment on what I see daily from non-technical people's inboxes. They are packed with mountains of various commercial newsletters and typically will get one or more of those per day.
There is definitely a minority out there like yourself that knows how to manage it and only subscribes to a few select newsletters, for I think for the majority of people, newsletters are a net negative otherwise you wouldn't see people with thousands of unread emails and there wouldn't be so much hype around tools like Hey.
> I'm not a fan of spam. Never will be
This isn't spam. It's a newsletter subscription people opt into by joining their website as a user. Users can opt-out of this specific newsletter in their FreeCodeCamp settings page and be fine and dandy afterwards.
Spam is something else entirely.