Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the verified-replies dept

This week, both our top comments on the insightful side come from our post about helping Elon Musk speed run the content moderation learning curve. In first place, it’s Christenson responding to a “suggestion” that really appears to be a complaint about Techdirt’s own comment voting system:

You are going to have to add some kind of a modifier for the reputation of each voter, otherwise Koby and Chozen and his a*shole friends put 100s of downvotes on oddball’s innocuous or good post because s/he’s an oddball. That’s happened to people on Twitter.

Slashdot worked as long as the audience was primarily technical and voting in good faith, but broke down in the presence of trolls. Same as things like network news groups from back in the day.

In second place, it’s an anonymous reply to a comment listing some supposed examples of Twitter censorship:

Letting said former president do whatever the fuck he wants until he became a huge criminal liability is not censorship, it’s basic business sense.

Kicking the white supremacist views of the Babylon Bee off the platform isn’t censorship, either. The owners and slush fund payers of the Babylon Bee are free to call for the deaths of Democrats on their own site, assuming they like being monitored by the FBI. Also, their satire is not satire, but thinly-veiled insults and threats. I understand that satire is hard to pull off, but hatchet jobs aren’t it.

Moderation isn’t censorship, yes. Censorship involves a lot of things, like SLAPPing critics into silence, arresting critics, denying funding to research that doesn’t fit with the state’s narratove, watching the academics, blocking sites that reveal not so nice sides of the state narrative…

Private companies have not gone to the full extent they are capable of yet. Including hiring people to murder rivals and critics.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more anonymous comment on that post, this time replying to a comment asking why we think Musk doesn’t know anything about content moderation:

I mean, there was the time he said he’d only block illegal stuff, like spam (which is mostly legal). That was kind of a gargantuan neon sign of a tip-off right there.

Or is your argument that, because Musk has spent billions on aerospace, automobiles, and electricity, that somehow obviously means he knows the first thing about content moderation? ‘Cause I hate to tell you this, but it doesn’t.

Next, it’s a comment from Anonymous Hero on our post debunking the Intercept’s bogus story about government policing of disinformation, responding to the assertion that the length of our response indicates the story was actually good:

You’re apparently unfamiliar with Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than the amount required to produce it.”

Over on the funny side, our top two winners are once again from the post about speed running content moderation. In first place, it’s Michael Barclay noting the number of steps we outlined:

Dante only had **nine** circles of hell

Congratulations, you more than doubled Dante’s nine circles of hell.

In second place, it’s That One Guy with some evergreen copypasta that has won before, and will surely win again:

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no…no not those views
Me: So…deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones

(All credit to Twitter user @ndrew_lawrence.)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Flakbait on our post about cancel culture panic and the concept of “self-censorship”:

Not going there

I was going to make a comment about this post, but I won’t because I’m afraid of the backlash I’ll get.

Finally, it’s one last anonymous comment putting an addendum on the many steps of the content moderation speed run:

Go to Level 1. Do not pass go. Do not collect 44 billion dollars.

That’s all for this week, folks!