I couldn’t disagree more. Scum is scum. The people who can discern the difference are few and far between, and we shouldn’t muddy the waters between different types of scum for the already-overwhelmed layperson.

Most people exclusively care about scum vs. not scum, and all but vuln-dev level sources shouldn’t distinguish.

Maybe HN fell on the savvy side of this at one point, but it was so long ago…

I appreciate the specificity, especially on a forum of tech-inclined users and collapsible comments.

If you’re “tech-inclined” enough to understand the difference, how does it alter your behavior?

I appreciated the distinction to help form my own opinion. I believe there are varying degrees of scummy-ness and appreciate someone not trying to "decide for me"

I feel like your “teach the controversy” response just reinforces my point.

Who hurt you? I can't believe that "Nuance is unacceptable" is the position you really want to go with.

Why not? "Assume good intentions" is really a pretty fucked up way to keep people down. There is so much scum around, assuming good intetions is bordering on dangerous naivity. So it is far safer to dump all shitbags into a single container, and stop caring about the supposed subtle differences.

Because we're actually quite bad at understanding people's motives (e.g. fundamental attribution error). Not to mention the various ways information gets biased as it flows through people and institutions.

I don't follow the logic.

I will note your posts are reading as activism/consensus building, which gets people removed from hackernews. So you might want to dial it down.

This kind of muddy thinking has hurt a LOT of people.

Nuance matters! While the guy who makes sexist jokes and the guy who will rape you if ever alone with you are both scum, that difference really really matters.

You mean "scums up" the waters, no?

At the end of day that's what matters.