4 ms·

It's hard to disagree without sounding like sour grapes. Last year I navigated the gauntlet while this year I signed up for the lottery the evening that they op

It's hard to disagree without sounding like sour grapes. Last year I navigated the gauntlet while this year I signed up for the lottery the evening that they opened registration and didn't get selected. Discussion about possibly buried and hidden codes didn't surface until a couple of days after I'd already signed up. Normally I love puzzles like this, but how many tickets could they have possibly given away with these codes? Compared with the total number of attendees, these were just a drop in the bucket. The overwhelming majority are simply going to be lottery winners. I fail to see how that is an improvement.

mahyarm 13y ago
It's a very google-ish thing to do a web scavenger hunt like this. It creates some fun buzz if anything else.
- chinpokomon 13y ago
  No, I realize that. I even spent a little time participating. I'm not sure I could have changed my registration after the fact and ultimately didn't find anything new. Since I was already registered in the lottery, I didn't spend a lot of additional time hunting. So while I do think the scavenger hunt is very Googleish, I still don't think the overwhelming majority of attendees will have gotten passes as a result, so I don't think this game really does much to tilt the needle. Most of the attendees will have fronted their $300 or $900 and will have been selected at random instead of by merit. I'm still looking forward to the event but I can't help but be disappointed by the result and I'm not sure this particular selection process will have generated the best pool of attendees. Demand simply exceeds supply, and no matter what selection criteria have been used, someone more deserving will be left out. I don't necessarily qualify that by suggesting that I'm more deserving, just that this process accentuates it. Ultimately it is Google's event to run and there is something to be said about providing an equal chance to everyone, but there are tradeoffs with this approach.

mahyarm 13y ago

It's a very google-ish thing to do a web scavenger hunt like this. It creates some fun buzz if anything else.

chinpokomon 13y ago
No, I realize that. I even spent a little time participating. I'm not sure I could have changed my registration after the fact and ultimately didn't find anything new. Since I was already registered in the lottery, I didn't spend a lot of additional time hunting. So while I do think the scavenger hunt is very Googleish, I still don't think the overwhelming majority of attendees will have gotten passes as a result, so I don't think this game really does much to tilt the needle. Most of the attendees will have fronted their $300 or $900 and will have been selected at random instead of by merit. I'm still looking forward to the event but I can't help but be disappointed by the result and I'm not sure this particular selection process will have generated the best pool of attendees. Demand simply exceeds supply, and no matter what selection criteria have been used, someone more deserving will be left out. I don't necessarily qualify that by suggesting that I'm more deserving, just that this process accentuates it. Ultimately it is Google's event to run and there is something to be said about providing an equal chance to everyone, but there are tradeoffs with this approach.