"Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.

Huh. I always thought the point of "Sent from my iPhone" (or the earlier "Sent from my Blackberry") was that it indicated "I don't have access to my desktop and file server right now so don't expect me to send that file".

I once was involved with booking the actor Kal Penn for an event and his signature line was "Sent from your mom's house". I always loved that.

That's one way that it works, but that's not the main driver.

This kind of tagline marketing works best with people people who aren't even aware that they're participating, and who aren't bothered to do anything different it even if they become aware.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze, so the marketing remains.

  Sent from my iPhone
  Downloaded from Demonoid
  Rusty n Edie's: The world's friendliest BBS 216-726-0737

But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.

I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.

But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.

There's no such thing as bad publicity. If people who didn't know about your product become angry about your product, they're more likely to buy it.

100% I have one ~tiny~ project that has a handful of stars and actual people seem to use it. End of last year I received a huge slop drive-by PR on it. Spent 20 minutes reading it, realised it was just nonsense. I want my friggin' 20 minutes back.

I can't imagine how infuriating this is for maintainers of projects with much more footfall. I'm frankly shocked more aren't just outright closing the doors to PRs from unknown contributors

Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.

It's the masochism of downloading images at 2400 baud.

However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.

Someone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.

100% hundreds of people do.

Doubly so, because you are being used as ad-channel and not being compensated for it either.

Microsoft already does this with their mobile Outlook. Sent by Outlook Android / iOS on the bottom of the message.

Huge difference: the commit signature may not have had anything to do with Copilot, whereas email sent by mobile Outlook was... sent by Outlook.

Nah, they are both unacceptable spam. Don't put words in my mouth and don't hijack my communication for marketing.

I was just pointing out there's a difference, not endorsing any of it.

I don't really send emails anymore but when I actually used email to keep in touch with friends (during the interesting bit of time between smart phones becoming mainstream and SMS and other messaging services becoming more popular than email), I changed my signature to be "Sent from your iPhone" even though I used an android and mainly sent emails from my computer, just to be an edgy teenager. Got some interesting responses from that.

It's interesting to see how communication, digital and otherwise, has evolved over time.

But you can see it and remove it before sending. It’s definitely not the same.

Sometimes it randomly pushes without me asking, so I have a mess to clean up.

Does anybody else remember Tapatalk? They did the same with signatures in forums.

"sent from my iphone" originally meant more than just "i have a fancy phone that lets me send email" in the early days it meant "I'm not at my desk right now."