As has been said, has its place.
Most of the time, if you come up with a contrived, convoluted explanation for events, it's gonna be wrong, when the far simpler explanation is that you went wrong. In short, ignoring Occam's Razor brings you dangerously close to morphing the evidence to fit the read, rather than the other way around as it should be.
That being said, the scumteams that get Scummy Nommed the most generally are known for their flagrant violation of Occam's Razor. After all, which is simpler? The scum mislynched everyone suspicious of them and killed for chaos, or that the scum just killed who suspected them? *coughcoughTALESOFYOUcoughcough*
I will rage a rage like no other when people (other than newbies who don't know better) use "but, wifom!" in a game. (And even the newbies I'll give a serious lecture to about how if they ever want to make it far in the world, they will forget that term ever was invented.) Wifom, like ignoring Occam's Razor, is very, VERY frequently invoked by players that are going down the road of ignoring simple, clear, probable evidence in favor of contrived, convoluted paranoid delusions.
An outdated term for the most part, but can still be convenient shorthand. It's basic meaning is tied to active lurking: "that post that you're saying is content? Really isn't; nothing was done in it."
Is, by 95% of people, done wrong. "X did this in game Y as town, and didn't do it in game Z as scum, therefore is town" = you're doing it horribly, horribly wrong.
"X has a strong tendency to do Y as town and not as scum, as games 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 as town show and games 1, 2, 3, and 4 show as scum." Not great, but better. Adding a disclaimer might help: "So while it's no sure bet that X having done Y makes X town, I find it at least more probable than not." Still not perfect, of course, but it is at least not as horrible.
In general, greater sample size and greater ambiguity and less assurance of accuracy are what makes meta be more effective: the more games you play with them, the better your understanding of them is. The less specific your focus is, the harder it is for the player to have changed. The more you use it as a guideline rather than hardfast rule, the better its usage will be.
Context is key. Circumstances are everything. And on top of that, players change. These three factors must, must, MUST be accounted for in meta analysis, else the meta is worthless.
Should not be confused with scum, which should not be confused with anti-town, which should not be confused with a scumtell. Pet peeve of mine when people do. I say as shorthand all the time, "sure it was scummy, doesn't mean it was from scum". Scummy means 'looks (sometimes objectively, sometimes subjectively) suspicious' to me, scumtell is an action that is objectively more likely to come from scum than from town (by the way, while we're on the subject, there's no such thing as a general scumtell, but PLAYER-SPECIFIC scumtells do in fact exist), anti-town means "works against the town but holds no alignment-relevance", and scum means, "not just scummy, just plain scum, it's more than just looks" in essence, being a hard statement.
There's overlap of course. Subjective-scummy overlaps a lot with Scum, anti-town actions almost always look scummy, and whatnot, but none of the terms are synonyms for me.
'genuine'
...Is okay for tonality things, but on the condition of
not
being emotions = town. You can say something is genuine and not genuine, but genuine emotions != town, even though not-genuine emotions = scum.
'rolefishing'
Doesn't, and for as long as I've been on the site (so, 2008-earlier), never has, existed. No actual scum rolefish. Ever. Any accusation against scum rolefishing was them not meaning any fishing. Town might occasionally 'fish, but basically never do so accusations against them are also fairly false. And even if you say this isn't so, I'd like to clarify: explicitly calling for a claim is in no way shape nor form a rolefish. It's demanding a roleclaim, equivalent to throwing 5 tons of TNT into the water to kill every fish.
