It’s fairly amazing to me that the person being accused of being a grifting creep is the journalist who tracked down quotes in several states from witnesses to a notable event instead of people who are clearly running a game on multiple lotteries.
Norms have really changed in the last decade or so.
the journalist is acting like a stalker wanting something from a lottery winner, and is indistinguishable from the other people out there that would be doing the same thing
someone playing a lottery in a way that no lottery authority disagrees with would never be called grifting.
Lately there’s been a burst of intense anti-journalist sentiment generated by various tech plutocrats who would prefer to be free of public investigation or criticism. This sentiment trickles down to professional class workers with aspirational visions of becoming plutocrats, where it is enthusiastically aped and amplified, and applied indiscriminately to basically any journalistic endeavor, under the principal that the wealthy and influential should never have to be exposed to the public eye on anything other than their own terms
someone winning the lottery and getting their family members bombarded on Facebook messenger by strangers has absolutely nothing to do with professional class tech workers echoing their amoral leadership
The recent outburst of hostility to journalism in the tech sector is absolutely the result of a lot of tech and tech-adjacent sacred cows coming in for public examination and criticism for the first time, and a driving factor is absolutely driven by the tendency of tech sector workers to personally identify with their employers. If this is not apparent to you, then you are
But regardless, if you come up with any kind of system to generate millions of dollars, whether it's a business or a way to game the lottery, you should absolutely expect to be subject to public scrutiny and it's ludicrous to frame a Facebook DM as an unacceptable invasion of privacy (making this argument while working in the surveillance-tech sector elevates the absurdity to self-parody)
It is unacceptable to try to track someone down about money through their parents.
You are conflating this with that other conversation you keep trying to force happen.
This conversation has nothing to do with mirroring tech leadership or personally identifying with employers. I am not an employee anywhere and you failed to predict what I do as well. Moving on before your next ad hominem finishes rendering, they could consider using states and game combinations where anonymity of winners is protected and maybe they already are. There is an argument to be had about anonymous winners.
I'm not talking about you personally, obviously I don't know or care what you do or who you are (although if you suddenly came up with a way to make $6 million, perhaps I’d take an interest). I'm merely making a correct observation about a phenomenon of which you are a small part.
It is of course even more ludicrous to expect anonymity when you have solved the lottery in states that do not permit anonymous winners.
> It is unacceptable to try to track someone down about money through their parents.
As a blanket statement, that's nonsense. Stalking someone's parents to collect an unpaid medical would certainly be unacceptable. A polite DM or e-mail requesting an interview with someone who has apparently come up with a foolproof method to generate millions of dollars is entirely reasonable.
They're not journalists because they published too much info? It seems a lot more like journalism than a lot of stuff I see published such as "Top 10 x for you to y with", or simply restating a bunch of facts from a different news article. This involved independent research.
would the person being bombarded by strangers be able to distinguish?
does it matter if they could distinguish if the person reaching out is saying they're going to put all their personal information online in an even more digestible format so that more people will harass their parents on Facebook Messenger?
> would the person being bombarded by strangers be able to distinguish?
If it's via email you could see the domain in the email address. Back before email, journalists might contact people via phone, and I'm not sure if it's so easy to tell then. I assume the email/phone call/facebook message starts off with an introduction saying something like "I'm a journalist with such and such a newspaper..."
> does it matter if they could distinguish if the person reaching out is saying they're going to put all their personal information online in an even more digestible format so that more people will harass their parents on Facebook Messenger?
Do you think the personal information is irrelevant to the story? Do you think this is a story that shouldn't be covered? I think it's an interesting story, and giving some info about the characters in the story helps make it more interesting. It's generally considered proper form to contact the subjects of your article, so I would think it would actually be worse if the journalists didn't contact the people in the story. The purpose of putting the info about the characters is certainly not so that people will harass their parents on Facebook Messenger. It's not like they included their email address, phone number, link to a Facebook profile, or physical address. I don't consider stuff on my Linkedin profile to be creepy. My Linkedin profile is my brag page; it would be great if journalists were writing about stuff on my Linkedin profile.
> grifting creeps.
Are they worse than journalists 50 years ago? Would you consider all journalists grifting creeps?
uh yeah, these grifting creeps posing as journalists are exactly what people expect when they win lottery tickets and claim them non-anonymously.
these students are clearly fronts for limited partners that found a way to stay anonymous