I’m opposite. Of the ~5 times I got cold emailed based on my HN profile it was someone asking me if I’d be interested in a product of their startup.
I feel the shift started happening around the time product hunt got popular, so a couple of years before you joined.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988065
But yeah, it got very little comments and they were mostly negative.
Copy-pasted templates are never appreciated, but hand-written, personalised outreach that considers the recipient's situation can go down well.
> 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.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
> Examples of processing include:
> [..]
> sending promotional emails*;
> [..]
"I see from your hacker news comments you're interested in scaling startups, our project/product .."
Spam.
A few mails. They were responsive when I asked questions back.
Yes, maybe a sales pitch but I found it interesting.
Other than that a few people hqve asked me about lobste.rs invites and I generally give them after looking a few pages back in their comment history to try to verify I don't let in anyone with a trollish or hostile attitude.