> I know that I could beg our @dang to act as intermediary and contact the user in question on my behalf, but he's too busy and valuable to turn into a glorified phone operator :-)

Oh my god no. I intentionally am uncontactable on here and I’m sure that’s true for many others. I don’t want HN people to connect with me, open doors, etc. It may surprise some folks, but some of us don’t give a shit about networking, hustling, etc. via online message boards.

For all the high quality tech people on here, there seems to be a similar number of hucksters, get-rich-quick people, life-optimization-influencers, technical dilettantes, and other types I actively would like to avoid ever being contacted by. If the admins ever facilitate piercing that anonymity that would kill this site forever for me.

I know that I could beg our @dang to act as intermediary and contact the user in question on my behalf, but he's too busy and valuable to turn into a glorified phone operator

He would not do that. If people do not wish to be contacted outside of HN they leave their contact information out of the profile. I personally like that I have the option and to keep conversations here. If something was urgent I can create a throw-away email and temporarily list it in my profile, then remove it.

I would suggest that if people opt to share contact info in their profile, they should use a canary address that can be discarded without causing grief as there are some unhinged lurkers. I see them planning raids on this site from other sites from time to time.

Maybe people want to be unreachable? HN is one of the safe spaces for those of us from the olden days of the ‘net, before it was real names and total visibility. Anyone who wants to be contacted puts their info in the about box. Those who don’t, don’t.

Recently, I found it creepy that someone actually found me elsewhere on the internet because they got upset with something I said on here, then were trailing my fairly well manicured online presence for ad hominems to use here. I could see it in my analytics logs. I found it pretty weird, so I for one wouldn’t want any more of my contact details available here, where I’m free to say whatever I want and let the community upvote or downvote it.

The best is when people post on “Who wants to be hired” with no way to contact them, I don’t get it.

A thread of frustration this is, because people who agree or are neutral will remain silent even if outnumber those who criticize. Note taken, but personally I try to keep my internet “images” disconnected for unclear forward privacy reasons. And maintaining yet another fake email for that - too lazy.

I think that unless you’re going to reach people daily, it’s probably okay to find a recent comment of a user and try to explain your ideas and communicate under it. Worst case they’ll politely pretend being offline.

> I know that I could beg our @dang to act as intermediary and contact the user in question on my behalf, but he's too busy and valuable to turn into a glorified phone operator :-)

The response to this bit is a little surprising. It's really not that uncommon for a platform operator to forward the rare message between users - even Github does this (I've requested they forward several messages to users in regards to acquiring particular usernames)

There's still a way to contact people who want to be contacted : they leave their website address or in any of their post, you may find something to get in contact with them.

Most of us don't want to be contacted on HN, we just want to discuss randomly in comments, that's it!

OP here: I guess I shouldn't have included the dang thing because it's all people are focused about now. Indeed it is very possible for dang NOT to contact one on anyone's behalf, it was just a silly assumption on my part for sake of argument, I didn't expect people to clutch their pearls. This post is not prescriptive.

The idea is if you want people to contact you, add an email, you maybe forgot to. If you don't want to, move along, nothing to see here.

Good idea!

nonsense to me

if you want to contact somebody just make the move, ask in a comment

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