Howdy. I'm the guy.

So, you're pretty much exactly who I wanted to reach with the second half of this post, because there is a great gap between a) your prior prediction of reality and b) the actual state of reality. The actual state of reality is "350 emails submitted in the last hour, approximately 60% confirmed."

This is useful signal for you, because the next time you have to make a similar prediction about the nature of reality, where that prediction might be consequential, you will ideally make a better prediction. All HNers who run a business have to make predictions like "I have a limited budget in terms of time, focus, and resources. If I spend effort on getting permission to email customers and then emailing them, will that do good things for the business?"

You might have had incomplete data prior to making your prediction of reality. Here's some things which are probably material to that prediction which would have suggested biasing it in the favor of more confirmed opt-ins.

1) I've spent a wee bit of time on HN for the last three years or so, and some folks around here find that I say helpful things.

2) People will, generally, leap at the opportunity to get something which is presented as being something of value. (Covered, in depth, in the blog post.)

3) A lot of people -- including people who are very similar to you in many ways -- would happily ask to receive email if that were communicated to them as being something of value from someone they trusted.

There's other things which would have suggested guessing a lower number than one might have otherwise:

1) The call to action in this blog post is not graphically prominent. (See my other comment on this thread regarding a squeeze page, which means a page designed to encourage conversions to an email submission. This page is very much not a squeeze page.)

2) You have to read things, go to a separate page, and then take action.

3) The list requires double opt-in (the first opt-in is giving your email address, the second is clicking a link in an introductory email to you saying "Yes, I want to receive email from you"), which will always and everywhere decrease uptake versus single opt-in.

Thank you for this detailed reply. You've certainly convinced me to at least weigh the option more carefully. (And you're right, I never would have predicted that many confirmed emails off of that link, in part for the reasons you cite about prominence etc. And my low prediction was even though I knew that HN traffic numbers, just in terms of number of hits to the submitted page, could be potentially staggering. I thought your link would have very few takers despite the extra traffic to the page it's on.)

I think one thing that is missing is that there is not an obvious social norm of how many emails are absolutely okay. (e.g. if you bought something from me this year, is it okay to email you once a month? once every two months? twice a year? weekly?) wonder if you have any thoughts about this. (Sorry if I missed this in the post.)

I signed up. If I don't like it, I trust Patrick enough to just take me off the list again.

In the past I have subscribed to quite a few newsletters and mailing lists like this. Some are great, most I dropped because they sent too much irrelevant stuff. To manage this all list-mails get sorted into a different folder so they don't clogg up my inbox, which works very well for me - it doesn't activate the "oh, new mail, let's see what they want" feeling, it's more like looking at blogs that I read regularly.

I'm just one datapoint, but Patrick has built up enough goodwill capital over the years that it took me about eight seconds from seeing the announcement on his twitter feed to signing up for his list.

I signed up. (I would read Patrick's blog, but I don't use rss, so email is way better for me.)