Thank you for taking the time to respond instead of just downvoting. However, this is an Ends Justifies the Means argument, which I have always disagreed with and also disagree with here.
"Treating journalists like suckers" or "stalking them" isn't the same demographic as "folks who are disgruntled with journalists".
And really, what "expense"? They weren't outed. They lost nothing but possible future use of an email tool we produced (we found no current users signing up for trickajournalist.com).
And as for the intent of the site. It was a lot of things. But first and foremost it was to raise an awareness of how bad email has become. People are doing awful things with email. All the automation, cold email targeting, etc. I wanted to put some satire out so maybe some folks operating sites might take pause at what they're offering, and who they're offering it to. I wanted to raise a novel method of how to deal with things like this. I wanted to raise how easy it is to promote awful tools like this was even when ads are supposed to be human moderated on a lot of places.
