Why is this community full of sales pitches and spam?
Most posts have turned into disguised self-promotion, AI-generated research, and cold pitches from vendors looking for pain points instead of genuine discussions. This overwhelming amount of promotional content makes people stop reading the community entirely.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- People have been saying this in most months since June 2026.
- This comes up 37.6× more often in r/ITManagers than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
- 1reporting and downvoting postsDid this help you?
- 2stopping reading posts altogetherDid this help you?
- 3unsubscribing from affected subredditsDid this help you?
- 4Moving vendor posts and general questions to dedicated weekly stickied threadsDid this help you?
- 5Reporting non-aligned posts to moderatorsDid this help you?
- 6Reducing overall participationDid this help you?
- 7Politely telling recruiters not to call and setting boundariesDid this help you?
- 8Canceling contracts after realizing the association with MLMsDid this help you?
- 9Hanging up or refusing to entertain the callsDid this help you?
- 10Using Akismet anti-spam pluginDid this help you?
- 11Meeting prospects in personDid this help you?
- 12Starting a conversation and listening to problems instead of selling directlyDid this help you?
- 13Calling them on the phoneDid this help you?
- 14Calling out the poster as a bot or spammer in the commentsDid this help you?
- 15Using polite, short emails with a pitchDid this help you?
- 16Promising to reach out only once every 3-6 months and respecting opt-outsDid this help you?
- 17Positioning oneself as a problem-solver who can step in when a project is falling apartDid this help you?
- 18gating post-reply communication through a human before sendingDid this help you?
- 19sending fewer messages with better reasons and researchDid this help you?
- 20Using traditional CAPTCHAs, Turnstile, or keyword filtersDid this help you?
- 21add filters to run on your mail clientDid this help you?
- 22Blocking whole email domainsDid this help you?
- 23Ignoring cold emails entirelyDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“The vendor spam was getting out of hand”source ↗
“the sub is quieter because 90% of posts are just disguised vendor spam. It makes me not want to participate.”source ↗
“It's dead, and if you start emailing people I work with outside of the IT department, I will block your entire domain.”source ↗
“It feels like only one in five posts lately is from someone with a real ecommerce problem. The rest are thinly disguised dev research, AI-tool validation, agency lead-gen, or startup people fishing for merchant pain points.”source ↗
“That's why I stopped reading posts. most of them are just trying to sell something.”source ↗
“There’s so much slop in this sub, it needs to be moderated better”source ↗
“I'm on a call right now. It is my third call this week from someone in my networking group who wants to "help" me become a life insurance agent.”source ↗
“UPDATE: No kidding, I am on the fourth call right now!”source ↗
“I literally got recruited, by someone I connected with on a personal level. I signed up thinking I would only get my license to get a monetary commission from referring people to her.”source ↗
“It doesn't get much traffic I hoped for (200 visitors per month), but scam comments come daily. I only use Akismet not anything else.”source ↗
“I wanted to ask if those comments show my blog getting more online presence? If so, is that something I celebrate?”source ↗
“most contact-form spam today isn't bots — it's human-written. 10-15 emails a day like 'Dear webmaster, we sell high-DA backlinks' (each slightly reworded so keyword filters miss them), plus 'your domain will be suspended in 24h' phishing scares and Bitcoin extortion demands.”source ↗
“literally every single day I get five to ten emails that are one to two sentences offering a business loan. The emails themselves are laughable in how they approach sales but the volume of them is unbearable. What can I do to stop or filter these? I'm concerned about creating too broad of an email filter that will capture customer emails.”source ↗
“I get multiple emails a day about people offering their services for anything and everything, including web design, SEO, marketing, lending, buying the business, etc...”source ↗
“I send every single one of them to spam without even reading it.”source ↗
“The vast majority of business owners have become extremely numb to email sales.”source ↗
“I find it annoying. Don't come to my office to sell me crap. When you do this, it tells me that you have zero respect for the time/availability.”source ↗
“The tell for us was always the follow-up sequence — a real rep remembers what you said in the first reply, automation resets to the template.”source ↗
“Even though most of them were keen then, once I contact them with a follow up, they seem to not respond.”source ↗
“I run a small business, and my contact form keeps getting filled in by the same guy. Same name, a different Gmail every time, posing as a buyer with a budget and a timeframe”source ↗
“getting spammed every day from scammers trying to help you promote your store/app”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 3How to stop an email spam bomb attacking a user inbox
- 6Why do I keep getting calls after getting quotes online?
- 19Why isn't cold outreach booking any client meetings?
- 8Why do self-hosted emails keep going to spam?
- 26Why does visiting Egypt feel like constant scams and harassment?
- 7Why am I getting so many unsolicited acquisition and sales calls?