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Comment by duncan_bayne | Hacker News Reader

Repost from a different, and now I think abandoned, thread:

I'm curious - I keep getting downvoted whenever I criticise Ashley Madison on the grounds of morality. Why is this?

This isn't a whinge about downvoting (if I didn't want to get downvoted I wouldn't keep posting about A-M), but a genuine inquiry into the reasons.

Is it that people see discussions of morality as off-topic for HN? Do people disagree with my moral judgement of A-M? Or disagree with moral judgement in general?

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IMO, you're getting downvoted because your judgment of people on AM assumes facts not in evidence (i.e., that users of AM are there to cheat on their unknowing spouses), and then judges those people based on those facts that only exist in your head. It's self-aggrandizing, and the tone doesn't come off as participation in a discourse about morality as much as a narcissistic statement about the identity you'd like people to assign you ("wow, duncan_bayne is hardcore judgey about those AM users. He must really be against adultery.") See also [0]. Finally, it's also a derail from the reasons people are discussing the story that is more HN-relevant (technical and security aspects, user data practices, etc.).

So to answer your closing questions - 1) "no", people discuss morality all the time on HN, especially in relation to economic relations, 2) Probably "yes", because your judgment says more about what you want to say about adultery than about the actual behavior of AM users (who could have all sorts of non-adulterous reasons to be on the site), 3) clearly "no" (see (1)), but jumping to that overarching assumption that people are downvoting your comments because they just don't like morality is part of that self-aggrandizing impression I'm talking about.

If this was a dump of Petsmart's customer database, and you posted a bunch of comments judging the Petsmart customers as deserving to be exposed because they bought their pet from a puppy mill and some PETA links, people would downvote you, too--partially for the substance and partially just for derailing the conversation.

[0] http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.html

you're getting downvoted because your judgment of people on AM assumes facts not in evidence (i.e., that users of AM are there to cheat on their unknowing spouses

This is all text from the homepage of Ashley Madison:

"Ashley Madison is the world's leading married dating service for discreet encounters"

Their tagline, a registered trademark is, "Life is short. Have an affair.®"

"Ashley Madison is the most famous name in infidelity and married dating."

"Thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands signup everyday looking for an affair. "

You are confusing marketing with actual use. Cf "to serve and protect".

Not surprised to see the overlap between the anti-cop and pro-adultery crowd.

I've been known to drink Budweiser. Does that mean that I believe that women will suddenly find me sexy and the Swedish bikini team will appear as I pop off the bottlecap to lavish me with scantily-clad attention?

You are conflating the marketing copy of the company with the intentions and motivations of the users. Just because something confirms your most cynical expectations doesn't make it true.

Ashley Madison has absolutely no idea whether any particular user, if they are married, is on there to do anything with their profile other than browse, or whether their spouse knows they are on there, or for that matter if a couple is browsing the site together as part of their joint fantasy life, or if they are in an open relationship, or a number of other scenarios that have no impact on you and really provide no basis for you to cast judgment about their motivations--especially in an absence of evidence.

See again, my cite to David Brin's article on addiction to outrage.

Uh, what? How is membership in a website that is known, markets itself, and is designed as a cheating website not evidence of the intentions and motivations of its members? Of course membership in Ashley Madison isn't irrefutable proof that a person is looking for an affair. But how is it also not good reason to believe that he/she is?

You can use a gun for killing, and it's marketed for that specific purpose. Does owning a gun make you a killer?

No, because I'm talking about intentions and motivations, not actions. I said it's reason to believe that someone has intentions/motivations to have an affair; I didn't say it's enough to believe that someone has had an affair.

The reputation, marketing, and design of guns is a good bit more varied than Ashley Madison's. But yes, buying and learning to use a gun shows a certain intention or willingness to kill. It may be to kill a deer you're hunting or to kill a person in self defence, but in general it's evidence of a certain willingness to kill.

You're making a lot of false assumptions. You could be the owner of gun, intending to fire it against inanimate objects only. Like a paper target at the gun range.

One could even have bought it out of simple curiosity.

Yes. And you could be a member of Ashley Madison who's just curious, or who's doing a documentary for Al Jazeera, or who's trying to see if your spouse is on it.

I was speaking generally. I said that it's reason/evidence in favour of a conclusion. I said that it isn't proof of it. Those kinds of general rules and presumptions are useful for all kinds of things and in all kinds of ways. Or do you think that our judgements should be entirely composed of perfectly comprehensive and universal rules?

You sound sincere. Part of it may be the fact that, generally, you are violating "judge not lest thee be judged" and specifically, outing the adulterers also stands to cause real harm to their families, and also many of us know of circumstances where covert extramarital affairs kept families together in a good way.

I downvote a bunch of these style of posts because they're i) really unpleasant judgemental gloating or ii) idiotic assumptions.

> I keep getting downvoted whenever I criticise Ashley Madison on the grounds of morality. Why is this?

Because although most people agree with you, your statements are not considered as interesting. Presumably because they're considered as trivially true. Votes aren't about whether what you wrote is true/false, but whether reading it provides some insights to readers.

If you commented "War in awful!" under a war-related post, you'd be downvoted too, not because people find war awesome, but because reading such a truism give no valuable information to anyone.

To me the relative morality of A-M and the people using it seem somewhat irrelevant to the larger discussion. It's always fun to gloat when bad things happen to 'bad' people, but even people who live a lifestyle you strongly disagree with should have access to the same basic rights as you wish to have, including the right to privacy.

I know one person that I suspect would be in there if I bothered looking. If he did have an affair I'm sure he'd have been thrilled for his wife to find out, since they were very attached before the stroke and vegetative state.

I admin email systems. Not my place to judge.

Perhaps because people don't deserve to be punished by crackers? It's not guaranteed all users on there are harming society. It's not like it's, I dunno, Oracle getting internal documents leaked. Or Sony (and despite how bad Sony may be, some folks were rightfully concerned for the damage to innocent employees). Or BP or the USG.

Overall I find it rather funny, and I gotta wonder who the hell would use such a site with their real name and billing info. Though I'm not under any delusion that it's fair, or that it's justice, except against the company itself.

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