I don't think I agree that ethics are ultimately irrelevant. Regardless, though, I think you're confusing being "manipulative" with being "opinionated".

I'm 100% being opinionated. I'm not being manipulative, though, because I am not trying to make anyone do anything -- let alone trying to do it through unwarranted emotional appeals.

Are you kidding me? You're purely appealing to emotions with the moral labels.

Your post got the parent comment to edit their post because they felt they weren't taking a harsh enough stance against what you consider unethical. It was manipulative.

This is getting very meta.

I profoundly resent this behaviour from the BBC app and from the people who built it. I would resent it from any party. It’s no problem to clarify that.

But to the “bad guy”. IMHO behaviour is different from identity (i.e. a focus on what people do and the effect it has, not who they are).

If the premise of your organisation is existentially predicated on scummy behaviour then that does implicate identity and maybe you are the cartoon villain “bad guy”. The developers aren’t bad guys, nor are the BBC. But they are both doing (marginally) harmful things.

But “bad guy” is also common shorthand for “guy who exhibits bad behaviour”. For some that distinction might even be splitting hairs.

I agree with all of that. That was my main point in general. Separate out individual behaviors from what a person "is".

>But “bad guy” is also common shorthand for “guy who exhibits bad behaviour”. For some that distinction might even be splitting hairs.

This is where the disagreement really comes from. It's a very common posting style on Reddit/Twitter/social & political HN threads.

I just don't like it.

Again, in order to be manipulative, I would have had to been intending to alter what someone else does. I had no such intent.

What I did was express my opinion. You seem to be arguing that expressing an opinion is a bad thing.

I'm not sure what I've said that made you so angry. The opinion I expressed was "unethical behavior is unethical regardless of who does it", which I would not have expected to be controversial.

You don't need active intent to be emotionally manipulative. Being manipulative is about control.

Your actions attempt to exert control over other people by making them acquiesce to your ethical demands, lest they want to be considered "bad guys" too. Hence the guy editing his post from his original point of empathy to something lesser.

>You seem to be arguing that expressing an opinion is a bad thing.

My main point that I haven't made clear is that individual bad or unethical actions don't make a person "good" or "bad". That's what I take exception to in your post.

That was my intent by pointing out that you could be considered a "Bad Guy" if we were to reduce people down to a single black/white moral adjective based on one of their actions.

Your recap of your comment is not controversial. It doesn't have any of the language I take exception to.

Ahh, I understand better now. Thank you.

> Your actions attempt to exert control over other people by making them acquiesce to your ethical demands

I think that you might be reading a bit too much into this. That was absolutely not my intent.

> individual bad or unethical actions don't make a person "good" or "bad".

I agree. I was speaking casually, using slang that I assumed would be understood (that's why I capitalized "Bad Guy" -- to indicate that I'm not literally talking about the person being fubndamentally bad).

The irony is that the reason I speak rather formally in my comments on HN is to try to minimize exactly what happened here -- having my statements misunderstood in a way that I didn't anticipate. English makes misunderstanding all too easy.

That one just slipped past my rhetorical guard.