Short version: My website asks for people's email addresses because it can take 1 minute to respond (instant response is impossible). It's a 100% free service: I don't show ads, there's no spam, no subscriptions, no marketing, no selling or trading of email addresses, etc. But every time I advertise, complaints about requesting an email address dominate the comments and drown out those who actually use the website, making it impossible to gain traffic. Any advice on how to handle this?

Full version:

I'm not actually in PR, but a software engineer doing my 1-person startup, and I've been dealing with the same issue on and off again for ~4 years. I was hoping someone with more experience could help me, or at least point me in the right direction.

Basically I have a website that generates personalized recommendations. So if you tell me you like A, B, C it will tell you to check out D, E, F and not bother with X, Y, Z. However, computations are slow (~30 seconds on average, but can be up to ~2 minutes), so instant replies (like google search) are just not possible. So instead of super-long loading screens that would get abandoned, I send the recommendations via email.

The issue is I get LOTS of hate about the email request. On the tame end, I'll get downvotes and comments that they would never use a product requesting email. On the more serious end I'll get public accusations of being a spammer, nasty DMs, requests with fake email addresses like [email protected], and even fake reviews (e.g. saying the quality of the recommendations is bad without ever having used the product!).

To be clear, I'm 100% fine if someone doesn't want to provide their email / use my product, but I'd like to avoid them drowning out the actual users / killing my product with unearned hate.

And to be clear, I don't send spam or sell email addresses. There's no subscriptions or ads or reminders. This is a 100% free service.

Things I've tried:

  1. I implemented an alternative to email. What was interesting was that the complaints went down even though almost nobody used this alternative (<5 requests over 2+ years)! However, maintaining this alternative became technically infeasible, so I had to remove it, and now the complaints have resurfaced.
  2. I explain all of the above right under the email field. The complainers don't seem to read this as it seems to have no impact on their behavior.
  3. I have offered to manually generate recommendations for the complainers (i.e. if they DM me on reddit, I'll reply privately with their recommendations). They almost never take me up on this.

Their criticisms don't seem to be about usability / functionality, because they do not use the alternatives available (i.e. #1 and #3 above).

So I don't understand what's going on here. Is requesting an email address seen as a severe violation of internet etiquette? Is there a modern religion that thinks this is worthy of a public stoning?

I could of course spend significant time coding up another alternative (e.g. a loading screen), but time is money, and I don't want to spend months developing something that is never used (as I did in scenario #1).

I need to advertise this service in order to grow it, but these responses are a serious headwind (both in a marketing sense and psychologically) that needs to be addressed.

So is there anyway to reduce this vitriol? How would you handle this issue if you were in my place?

Details that probably don't matter:

  • This is the text I show under the email field: "Recommendations take ~30 seconds to compute. We send one email per request; no ads or subscriptions. We will never sell or trade your email address. Your email address is protected by law."