So you lied to a bunch of people? While enticing them to participate in bad behaviour?
I don't get the joke
Spam is out of control. After we launched our bulk email tools, we immediately saw bad actors. So this was one novel attempt at filtering them out. If someone were awful enough to signup for a tool that had the copy and intent of the trickajournalist.com website had, they shouldn't be using our email tool. We didn't publicly shame them or make their lives any worse than they might already be. They just couldn't use our tool.
There's no negative consequence to just signing up for TrickAJournalist; only a negative consequence for attempting to sign up for Highrise while already having signed up for TrickAJournalist.
Someone who just literally wants to "trick a journalist", once, might sign up for TrickAJournalist; but such a person has no reason to also to use that same email address to sign up for the B2B CRM software Highrise.
Someone who wants to send knowingly-spammy bulk emails while purposefully dodging spam filters, would sign up for TrickAJournalist (which claims to be exactly for that); and also would sign up for Highrise, since it has bulk emailing capabilities and likely also has positive spam-filter cachet from all the legitimate uses other companies put it to.
As an aside, the main reason I didnt follow these links and find out for myself is because this is in part satire but mostly a marketing scheme to advertise Highrise. Sorry, I dislike these sort of tricks, it makes me feel manipulated. And I prefer not to add my traffic to such endeavours.
And come on, spam is hardly an unnoticed issue which one meeds to raise awareness for.
Someone should create something like Grammarly or Medium's community-editor feature, for email campaigns. "Before you hit send, get a first impression on your campaign from 10 random beta readers from our community." Then give the beta-readers a prominent "this looks like spam" button to press.
Probably it wouldn't give any different of a response than a regular spam filter; but I imagine that most ad people will think of "it went into the spam filter" as a technical problem, rather than a problem with their messaging. Whereas, if real humans tell them the campaign looks like spam, maybe they'd listen.
This always seemed like a powerful quote to me, not least because I seem to be able to keep finding new applications for it.
[1]: https://readwrite.com/2014/05/29/jeff-atwood-stack-overflow-...
A bad actor towards spammers and a bad actor towards your legitimate customers are not the same thing.
A bad actor towards spammers, is being a good actor towards their legitimate customers.
"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.