Powerball Photo Fever! 5,000 Players Instagram Their Tickets

If you needed a reason not to buy a ticket for Wednesday's $500 million-plus Powerball lottery, here are a few. In fact, here are 5,000 -- roughly, the number of people who have taken pictures of their tickets on the popular photo-sharing service Instagram with the hashtag #powerball.

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Taken together, the multiple ticket pics should give you a sense of how unlikely it is that you'll win. Bear in mind that if you look at all of them, you'll still have an over-inflated sense of your odds of matching six winning numbers -- which are 1 in 175 million. Imagine if half the U.S. population Instagrammed one ticket each. You're getting close.

Still, the explosion of Powerball photos is an interesting phenomenon in itself. Not only does this Powerball boast a record-breaking jackpot, it is also the most widespread lottery ever recorded on social media. Some 600 tweets per hour with the hashtag #powerball were being seen by 6 p.m. EST Tuesday.

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Naturally, most of those tweets concentrated on what users would do with the money if they won. If you want to see an interesting cross-section of humanity's hopes and dreams, they're well worth reading.

So those thousands who Instagrammed a ticket may not win, but they can at least take comfort in being part of a bona fide social media phenomenon. And here's another benefit: unlike Instagramming your ballot, taking pictures of your lotto ticket is legal in all 50 states.

@Young_Pharaoh1

Click here to view this gallery. Image: Instagram user @justinshanley

This story originally published on Mashable here.



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