What I find interesting is the selectivity of the moral outrage.
On HN, people will casually discuss careers in defense, surveillance, ad-tech, exploitative finance, or fairly predatory forms of Silicon Valley capitalism without immediately being reduced to “antisocial scum.” The conversation is usually allowed to remain about incentives, systems, technical work, or professional history.
But game cheating seems to trigger a much more personal kind of condemnation.
My suspicion is that games occupy an unusually intimate place in people’s lives: they’re leisure, status, competition, nostalgia, and identity all at once. So violating the rules of a game feels less abstract than participating in an industry whose real-world externalities may be vastly larger.
That doesn’t make cheating harmless. It just makes the asymmetry interesting. Somehow writing a RuneScape cheat is treated as evidence of defective character, while doing technically impressive work for institutions or businesses with much more consequential externalities often gets discussed with detached professional curiosity.
Maybe the lack of self-awareness isn’t entirely on the side you think it is.
p.s. i've written a lot about my experiences in grey-market software on HN and I never once did so to brag : I did so because this is a place to share and develop technically interesting anecdotes.
p.s.s. I don't find your opinion on who scum is to be technically interesting.