Let's have a discussion about the usage of "meta"

[Iecerint]

Trust tell means you set up a way to confirm yourself as town by doing something subtle in your town games that you can refer back to to clear yourself. Doing this damns your scum games, so it violates the rule to play to wincon across games golden rule.

Self-meta is useful when you are playing with people who can't or won't see why you are town barring unlikely WIFOM. You can manufacture this as scum, so it doesn't damn your scum game and doesn't violate the rule to play to your wincon. That's the difference.

[Iecerint]

You can manufacture this as scum

This is why I feel strongly that "self meta" is useless.

You can manufacture any legal town play as scum.

Guess every town play is useless!

[Iecerint]

I am not talking about something as facile as "activity level." As a player, you can mess with that in a non-interactive way. If your meta is to barely play the game like a lot of players on the site (including notscience in a lot of games I used to play with him, though I think maybe he's improved in the last year or so), I honestly think players should question why they sign up for games and mods should blacklist certain players from games.

I'll give an example that is closer to what I am talking about. If you are being scumread, no one is reading the game, and you feel frustrated, but you realize that you made a towntell like 10 pages ago (e.g., especially one that was locally bad had you been scum -- for example, forgetting an aspect of the set-up such that you alienated a town player), it can be really useful information to demonstrate that because it can clarify your motivations. It's definitely 100% better if someone in the town actually plays like town and realizes stuff like that on their own, but it's pretty rare that you can count on people to pick up on stuff because people skim content that isn't related to themselves.

[Iecerint]

An argument against self-meta is an argument against defending yourself using your own previous posting (i.e., as opposed to doing it using others' posting). That's all "self-meta" boils down to.

[Iecerint]

I am of the opinion that everything a person does is best interpreted in light of who they are.

In terms of the example I gave, anytime someone says that they towntold, or someone says that something is a towntell, it's implicit that that person believes the towntell is relevant to the player being discussed. For example, if the player in my example had previously demonstrated that they feign set-up confusion as scum, then the "towntell" isn't really only relevant to the current game.

In terms of the example you gave, I think the main bad thing about that vein of statement is that it is non-interactive with the content in the current game. It's purely rhetorical and could be cross-supplied to almost any content in any game. I think a more specific version of it might be effective.