Comment by grimgrin
to settle a convo w/ a friend, how did y'all go about blasting emails inviting writing submissions? they suspect automated (naturally), i suspected possibly automated + "have had blogs hit hn front page", idk
edit: oh, right, this isn't a Show HN
Hi, project lead here :)
We do contact potential authors via email, but it's fully manual. I.e. we do not collect emails in an automated way, nor do we send them out in an automated way - everything is done manually by our Editor-in-Chief and, at times, other team members. Furthermore, we take care to only contact a given person once (I was on the receiving end of hakin9's mass author spamming a few years back, so we take care to not do what they did). Admittedly mistakes can happen here if we're unable to determine that it's actually the same person we've already contacted.
We find folks to contact in several ways. One is that someone from the team read/saw something they think is cool on the Internet - then we try to reach out to the author to ask if they are interested to write something / re-make some blog posts in form of 1-page articles (I personally believe there is value in re-surfacing cool stuff). We also look around in typical spaced where folks publish articles or where such articles surface (social media, aggregating sites, etc) and reach out to some of them.
I don't have exact stats, but a lot of articles come just from our Call for Paper, which we post about on our social media.