Finished Mafia LXI: Forest Fire: Game Over!

[Ephemera]

Scumtells:

Spoiler: Scumtells

What are they?
Scumtells are reads made on individual posts that fit into a certain archetype of posts that scum typically make.
Why do they work?
Scumtells work because for whatever reason, certain types of posts truly do come from scum more than town. This is especially applicable to new players.
When do they fail?
Scumtell-based reads tend to lack in accuracy for a couple of reasons. First, many commonly used scumtells on PB are less scumtells than playstyle policing. Yes, AtE and reasoning based on WIFOM are annoying and not convincing arguments, but they are absolutely not scumtells (in fact, they are typically the opposite). The other gigantic issue is that once a player is aware of a scumtell, them doing it becomes NAI. The reason Jabber was impervious to your scumtells is because he knew them already.
How could they have been used in this game?
-Mega's post #119 was highly guilty of Information Instead of Analysis, a scumtell where a player just posts a summary rather than any actual analysis
-FL's post #204 contained a "player salad", where newbie scum just lists a ton of reads without any thought behind them

NP's Subjective Opinion
I think that scumtells are highly overrated and incorrectly applied the far majority of the time. They serve best as good proxies for alignments for new players, but the idea that you can simply use the same formula with players every single game makes you super easy to fool as scum. Additionally, scumtells have no equivalent for getting townreads, which means they inherently give an incomplete view of the game state and will naturally lead to scumreads on people who post more.

I mostly agree with this – most "scumslips" aren't really scumslips (and tbh they come more often from blundering town) – but I will say that IIOA is very, very scummy.
...although I found myself pretty darn guilty of this on D5, what with my huge walls with no conclusion. Bleh.

Early game (D1) IIOA is pretty scummy, especially when the player tries to pass it off as analysis. When the player is more self-aware of it, then it's not as big a problem, but still.

 

[NinjaPenguin]

I mostly agree with this – most "scumslips" aren't really scumslips (and tbh they come more often from blundering town) – but I will say that IIOA is very, very scummy.
...although I found myself pretty darn guilty of this on D5, what with my huge walls with no conclusion. Bleh.

Early game (D1) IIOA is pretty scummy, especially when the player tries to pass it off as analysis. When the player is more self-aware of it, then it's not as big a problem, but still.

As I implied there, I think scumtells are extremely contextual and reliant on other players not being aware of them.
With your specific example, I happen to have played for a while on a site where IIOA was far and away the most common scumtell used by most of the players. It worked well for a while, but at some point, the meta adjusted. Any scum who was moderately decent learned that they would get suspected unless they provide analysis and within a couple months it was entirely inaccurate. IIOA is a great scumtell, but only if someone doesn't know about it.
That's sorta the inherent problem with content-based scumtells: any scumtell that someone knows is likely to be used against them is no longer a scumtell, since they'd avoid it as scum. The more you use one, the less it's usable. That's why imo scumtells are much much better for reading newbies than anything else.