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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

There's another case to be considered here, too - people who have used the site, got caught/came clean, did the work to fix it and have rescued their marriages (or were doing it with the blessing of their spouse), and now are at risk for their name being published for viewing by their coworkers, neighbors, members of their church, etc as a "cheater", "adulterer", etc, even after they've ostensibly paid their moral debt.

There are certainly a lot of karma coming to a lot of people who deserve it, but there's also a lot of hurt coming to people who probably don't.

An unrelated thought: I can only imagine how giddy the staff over at Gawker must be right now. This is like the David Geithner story times 37 million.

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Also not to forget is the partners who were cheated on, many of whom have the same last names and addresses as the exposed users. They are probably not interested in having their lives put on display like that, and would likely have preferred to be told of these affairs in a less public way. This can also cause a great deal of psychological harm to them! The vigilantes behind this could have destroyed the lives of many innocent people who did not deserve this.

Also people who registered on the site out of curiosity or fantasy and then never carried through on the act.

If your friends or coworkers abuse you because of their beliefs, then they are the ones causing harm, not the person who informed them. You sound like you're not giving full blame to those abusers or at least accepting that their behavior is inevitable. If you're a member of a church which abuses adulterers, and you don't think adulterers should be abused, then you're as much to blame by supporting that stance with your membership.

I think you're making the mistake of treating blame in this instance as though it has to add up to 100%, and blame on one party lessens it on another.

If my friend's dad hates gays, I tell him his son is gay knowing it's likely to cause violence, then the father and I are both total pieces of shit. His guilt does not absolve me in the least.

Forgive my language but a saying I like to live by and I'll say to myself quite often:

"You look like an asshole pointing out that somebody else is an asshole."

I am ruminating on the harm to be had here, not the moral culpability for it; it's easy to not be sympathetic here because these are by design people who occupy the moral low ground, but I can think of a few cases off the top of my head where this could cause real unwarranted harm to peoples' lives.

Improperly applied, this could be as damaging as membership on the sex offenders' list for public urination. The fact that the people passing judgment are the ones imputing harm doesn't really change the fact that there are people whose lives will be damaged disproportionate to their crime, and I think that's extremely unfortunate.

Edit: I can't recommend it as a literary work, but the themes and lessons of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" are directly and immediately relevant here.

> "There are certainly a lot of karma coming to a lot of people who deserve it, ..."

That's an extremely judgmental comment.

It's a shame you repeat his name.

You're right; I saw the initial story and then stopped reading everything about him, so I missed that the more polite elements were scrubbing his name. My mistake.

If an HN mod sees this, could you anonymize that for me? The comment is no longer editable.

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