Hacker News Reader

Comment by kthxbye123 | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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

kthxbye

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.

That is how journalism traditionally worked. The names were always part of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com