Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of 2022 At Techdirt
from the and-what-a-year-it-was dept
Happy new year, everyone! 2022 has ended, and that means it’s time for a look at the funniest and most insightful comments of the year at Techdirt. As usual, we’ll be honoring the top three winners in both categories, as well as taking a rare look at the list of comments that performed best when the votes from both categories are combined. If you’d like to see the winners for this week only, you can go check out first and second place for insightful, and first and second place for funny. Now, let’s get started!
The Most Insightful Comments Of 2022
Well, well, well… we’ve got a clean sweep of the insightful category in 2022! So let’s all take a moment and pay our respects to Stephen T. Stone, a common fixture of the weekly winners and a constant source of comments that our audience deems insightful. Stephen took all three top spots in this year’s rankings (though interestingly his comments don’t appear anywhere else in the top ten). Thanks for keeping the comment section lively and full of insight, Stephen! Let’s take a look at the winning comments.
For the first place comment, we head all the way back to January, when some totally bogus DMCA takedowns from giant publishers managed to completely nuke an entire book review blog. This happened amidst an unrelated right-wing freakout online, and Stephen racked up the insightful votes by connecting the two incidents:
To everyone who thinks AT&T dropping OANN is “censorship”: No, this is censorship.
The next two comments are also from earlier in the year, both coming in during the month of March. The second place winner is related to a tragically, maddeningly common incident: the cops killing a man who repeatedly told them he couldn’t breathe, after they pulled him over for driving under the influence. Predictably, some despicable cop apologists tried to blame the victim, Edward Bronstein, with one commenter flippantly saying “maybe don’t drive under the influence”. Stephen racked up the votes with the correct response to such nonsense:
Yes or no: Should drunk driving be a death penalty offense?
Corollary: Should that sentence be carried out at the moment of arrest rather than after a proper trial, verdict, and appeals process?
For the third place winner, we head to our post about Russia beginning preparations for disconnecting from the global internet and creating a Russian splinternet, during the early weeks of its invasion of Ukraine. Stephen’s winning comment raised an important point that is applicable to most situations where regular people are caught up in the violence of global politics:
A reminder:
The people most hurt by war always have the least to do with causing it.
And that’s that for the insightful side. Before we move on, one more round of applause for Stephen T. Stone! Now, the funny stuff…
The Funniest Comments Of 2022
No clean sweep on this side, but we kick things off with our first anonymous winner of the year. What’s more, the anonymous first place comment also racked up a lot of Insightful votes, elevating it to the top of the combined-vote leaderboard as well. This time, it’s from a post back in February, about the LA Sheriff making defamation threats against the city council for calling his deputies gang members. Our anonymous winner honed in on a specific comment from the Sheriff — “My personnel routinely place themselves in harm’s way while serving our community and ask nothing in return, other than a paycheck and maybe a little respect for the tough job they perform” — and offered up a response deemed by our readers as very funny, and very insightful:
You heard it here, folks!
Sheriff Villanueva has made it clear: they only need a paycheck and a ‘little respect.’ Therefore, they no longer need:
- Qualified Immunity
- Special treatment in misconduct investigations.
- Military-grade weapons and equipment.
Your honesty, sir, is a credit to your profession.
Following our truly anonymous first place winner, we’ve got our resident not-exactly-anonymous commenter in second place: That Anonymous Coward. This time, we head almost to the very beginning of the year, with our post on January 3rd about the court telling some Proud Boys that raiding the Capitol Building is not protected by the First Amendment. That Anonymous Coward racked up the funny votes with a decidedly unsurprised reaction:
They are proud boys…. not smart boys.
One also has to wonder what 1st Amendment lawyers are calling the idiot who filed this thinking it would work.
For our third funniest comment, we finally move a little later in the year, to Mike’s now-somewhat-iconic (and prophetic) November post offering to help Elon Musk speedrun the content moderation learning curve following his acquisition of Twitter. Michael Barclay swooped in with the very first comment on the post, then sat back and collected the funny votes:
Dante only had **nine** circles of hell
Congratulations, you more than doubled Dante’s nine circles of hell.
And that’s that for our two big categories! But, as promised, let’s take a look at the combined leaderboard…
The Top Comments Of 2022 For Insightful & Funny Votes Combined
As noted, the first place winner on the funny side was also the first place winner when you add in the insightful votes. But the next two stand alone, and bring us our only other anonymous winner this year! In second place for combined votes, it’s a recent comment about Elon Musk’s Thursday night purge of journalists on Twitter. Our anonymous winner combined insight and comedy in response:
For all the people who came and screamed that Twitter was moderating based on political viewpoints, will come here and admit that it never was and this is what true viewpoint discrimination looks like.
But alas, I haven’t seen a flying monkey yet.
Next, in third place for combined votes, we have a comment from Toom1275 that is actually rather similar in spirit. In June, the US Postal Service was sued for seizing “defund the police” face masks, and much like the second place winner, Toom noted how this appeared to be exactly the kind of infraction that certain groups were always freaking out about when they hadn’t actually happened:
Oh look, an actual rights violation by an actual common carrier.
And with that, we close the books on 2022! Once again, I’m grateful to all our commenters for supplying so much great material for both the weekly and yearly posts. Happy new year, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with in 2023!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of 2022 At Techdirt”
wait
what
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Funny, isn’t it?
But for next year.
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And now you get to have that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that will you manage to do it again…
Re: Congratulations, Stephen!
Hey, it’s still cool even though you didn’t sweep Funny too. It’s looking like you’re on track to win this year’s funniest comment. Well, at least until 2023 unleashes its own flavor of madness.
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On a slightly side note, there was an article a while back here in TD (dunno who wrote it) where the writer noticed from the numbers that the number of insightful tokens given were much greater than the funny ones. I wonder if this trend is valid nowadays as well.
At the time my hypothesis for this was that we were living Trump ascension to power and things weren’t generally good globally speaking so people were more gloomy. I’m not quite sure things improved so I’d wage it’s still the case.
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I’d suspect the core is that humor is much more subjective and varied than what the engaged (read: votes on comments) Techdirt audience considers ‘insightful’.
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I’m not as surprised that the one of us insightful enough to get their own article published here would do well with insightful commemts as well.
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Well damn, congrats on the triple win there, looks like the rest of us need to step up our game this coming year.
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His profile pic with the funny marker. Yeah.
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Everybody steps up their game, everyone wins.
Thanks again for posting during the holiday. May everyone have a better new year.
Only problem with this year
it isnt Last year.
Waiting to see what Some idiots will do, is so hard.
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I predict strong popcorn sales in 2023.
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Dang! I never recovered after thinking the end of the Prenda Saga was Peak Popcorn. What a fool I was! The killing I could have made on The Twitterpocalypse!
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Twitterpopcornlypse
Re: Re: Re:2
And here I am waiting for the Metalocalypse. Silly me.
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Fags who support Section 230 on TechDirt should just shut the fuck up
Techdirt is filled with fags who support Section 230 because it lines their pockets at the expense of victims of online harassment, doxxing, and stalking. Section 230 is about to be repealed by the Supreme Court and I can’t wait for victims to be able to sue internet platforms for the harms they perpetuated. The fags who support Section 230 on Tech Dirt are some of the most shitty pieces of human scum on planet earth.
Re: Misguided
Anyway, while I think tech companies like Facebook should be held to account for intentionally making their services addictive, your hatred for section 230 is somewhat misguided. Let me see if I can make a good analogy that a fag like you can understand.
Imagine you are a student and your teacher called you a fag. Would you rather sue the school (and possibly see the principal fired) or would you rather sue your teacher? Sure, you might get more money if you sued the school. But more people would suffer as a result, mainly your fellow students (who had nothing to do with it) as funds are drained from the school.
As much as I think Elon is an idiot, if someone else called me a fag on Twitter, I’d rather see them get punished instead of Elon. Sure I would love to get my hands on some of Elon’s money, but if he isn’t the one calling me a fag, he’s not the one who should be punished for it.
Am I wasting my time by explaining this to you? Probably. More than likely, really. But hopefully I can help somebody who wants to understand it to understand it.
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So, why do you hate the First Amendment and property laws then?
Because once Section 230 gets removed, 1A will go next. Then again, considering how much you hate Section 230, you probably also hate things like “the judiciary”, “proper checks and balances” and “treating people like human beings”.
And no, I will NOT shut the fuck up. Not all of us live in a place where freedom of expression is guantareed for ALL.
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Re: Re:
That’s wrong.
230 is just a law that immunizes sites from responsibility for opinions they host that have been written by others. There aren’t Constitutional issues involved in declaring that if a site hosts an opinion, it may be sued for slander or liberal over that opinion.
The 1st Amendment says that the government may not restrict freedom of speech, but slander or liberal are already actionable under it.
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If the site makes that opinion themselves, they aren’t liable for it, dumbass. Do you think Applebees should be liable for sex trafficking if I write “Call 555-6238 for a good time” in one of their bathroom stalls?
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Re: Re: Re:2
If someone scrawled a swastika or the “n-word” on that same bathroom wall, would you be comfortable with the owners choosing to leave that in place because they weren’t the ones who wrote it?
Immunity from liability for third-party speech is a convenience feature, making life easier for site owners. It’s not necessarily a moral judgement on how owners should deal with that speech. I favor such immunity because lack of it serves as an attack surface for people who want to take down sites for hosting opinions they dislike, but that’s just my own preference for how to balance liberty versus deliberate antagonism. If I were running a site, I would allow all viewpoints but moderate for spam, topicality, and decorum.
Re: Re: Re:3
Applebees didn’t etch that Swastika in the bathroom wall, and what’s likely is that they’ll take it down as they don’t want to be the place known where there are hate symbols on their walls.
Which brings us full circle to §230: You may think §230 means that web sites don’t take down hate speech, but you’re forgetting many things, namely
1. It’s the first amendment, not §230, that allows web sites to associate with people who post hate speech
2. the web sites will most likely take down the hate speech because they don’t want to be known as the web site that allows it,
3. and in cases they do (such as Parler, Gab, Truth Social, Elon-Musk-helmed Twitter, or any of the two 2^*chans), people will avoid it like plague gerbils avoid vaccines and masking, as seen by the decline of Elon-Musk-led Twitter and the rise of alternative Social Media networks such as Mastodon.
So there really isn’t as much as a problem as you say.
Re: Re: Re:3
That allows sites to host content that they have nor looked, and at a volume that they could not look at. Liability at the level of a book publisher has a significant impact and what is published, and that is a small proportion of the content that is submitted, while most submissions go unread.
A social media site should be no more liable for the conversation that occur on it than the owner of a pub,cafe restaurant etc should have for conversations held in their premises. They can act if the conversation comes to their attention, but they are not required to police all conversations held n their premises.
Re: Re: Re:4
A social media site should be no more liable for the conversation that occur on it than the owner of a pub,cafe restaurant etc should have for conversations held in their premises. They can act if the conversation comes to their attention, but they are not required to police all conversations held n their premises.
That idea does raise an interested question, namely ‘how many of those that think you should be able to sue a site for what a user posts also think you should be able to sue a store for what a customer says?’
If I’m browsing through a Walmart for example and hear someone saying something defamatory should I be able to sue the store because the other customer said it on their property? How about if I tell the management of said store and they decide not to kick the person out for whatever reason, then should I be able to sue the store?
By the logic of ‘230 is bad because it short-circuits lawsuits targeting the platform rather than the speaker on it’ suing a store for what a customer says while in it should be seen as legally sound and something they’d support, so I can’t help but wonder how many of the anti-230 people would accept their own argument when applied offline.
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Btw, it doesn’t immunize anything – it specifically points out that speakers are responsible for their own speech.
So, if someone has a site documenting court-cases about slander and libel which hosts the offending speech in question – can they be sued for slander/libel? Or, a library has a book about a case which contains the libelous statement, can the library be sued for libel? Can the publisher?
Forgive me if I don’t take your word on that there aren’t any constitutional issues involved because there always are when it comes to speech when the government is even tangentially involved.
Re: Re: Re:2
Anyone can be sued for anything. Whether the suit holds up depends on details of the law and the Constitution. I think the Volokh Conspiracy had an article about a lawsuit over quoting accusations from an arrest or a court case without mentioning that the accused had been exonerated.
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And without that immunity, social media, and user comments cannot exist online, unless approved by an editor, as the risk to the companies wold be too high. When an editor approves all comments, only a tint fraction are accepted for publication, at least until only choose people who have the comments accepted become the only ones to post, and everybody else gives up because their comments are never seen.
Re: Re: Re:2
So what? The law isn’t required to enable social media as it exists, if the lawmakers want to change it. 230 is good and useful, but when has that ever stopped the government from breaking things?
Re: Re: Re:3
They should be aware, then, that they risk pissing off more than their ideological “enemies” if they change 230. Even the slightest change to that law, regardless of intent, will upend the Internet as we know it.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Online services existed way before 1996 even without the protection of section 230.
Re: Re: Re:5
And was mainly used by geeks and had not attracted the attention of politicians and lawyers, nor was it being used by the people to organize themselves to appose some of the things politicians wanted to do.
Re: Re: Re:5
…revisionized said nobody with any understanding how anything works, ever.
Re: Re: Re:5
And were much smaller in size, and two of the largest ones faced damaging lawsuits… exactly of the kind that Section 230 was written to prevent.
Re: Re: Re:5
And those services faced legal liability for third-party speech, both for moderating and not moderating. 230 shifted liability for that speech onto the people who actually posted it. Change 230 in the smallest way and that liability can and will shift back to the services. That will end up entrenching the major players because smaller services will shut down because of lawsuits—either by losing them or not wanting to risk them.
Section 230 created the Internet as we know it today. Any changes to 230 will damage the entire Internet. How eager are you to see that happen?
Re: Re: Re:5
Nice try, John Smith.
Maybe you should stick to telling Hollywood about your power fantasies and mailing lists.
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Out here in the non-drug-induced world, it’s impossible for Section 230 to “immunize” wrongdoing in any way whatsoever, because in reality it only expedites early dismissal of fraudulent lawsuits if and only if the accused is 100% innocent of any crime – whether because what they did was 100% legal, or because they are not actually the guilty party.
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I mean, pure opinions and opinions based on disclosed facts cannot be libel or slander in the first place under the Constitution, so there are constitutional issues with declaring that anyone can be sued for slander or libel over an opinion, period, let alone the site hosting it.
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Shh honey, the adults are talking.
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Well look who’s fuckin’ high.
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As a dumb cocksucker (Let’s all hear that one word in Ian McShane’s voice.) I rate your comment as neither insightful or funny, it was pedestrian at best and that’s me giving you pity points.
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Nope. First, there is no evidence that victims of online harassment, doxxing, or stalking were harmed by §230. (Heck, doxxing isn’t even illegal, really.) Second, there is no evidence that Techdirt profits from §230 specifically.
[citation needed]
Should phone companies be sued for the harms done using their services? Or bookstores for merely having books that are later found to be harmful? Why should intermediary liability apply?
Also, even if they can sue, they would still lose because of the 1A.
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What an unfunny navel gaze this site is these days. Eating crow on the Twitter Files though–collusion at the highest levels
“When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on “anti-vaxxer accounts.” Especially Alex Berenson:”
https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607382379018190849
LOL. How’s all that crow taste around here?
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Until the twitter files reveal what trump had removed from twitter while president, i will assume anything released is a cherry picked politically biased hot job, not actual journalism, because that’s what it has proven itself to be.
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Yes or no: Did the U.S. government officially punish Twitter after Twitter refused to take action on more than half of the accounts mentioned to Twitter by the FBI? (If “yes”, what was the on-the-record punishment?)
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‘Your Honor the defendant is accused of issuing threat so extreme, so coercive that the victim chose to ignore them over half the time!‘
Hmm, not sure how well that would fly in a court…
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You underestimate the Americal legal system.
Re: Re: Re:2
especially the fifth circuit and the supreme court.
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Did someone eat crow you say? Who would that be?
Perhaps you don’t understand the idioms you use and are in need of some remedial education?
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Crows make better friends than you.
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Anti-vax content seems to me one of those “slam dunk” cases where the content should be removed, the account holder banned and charged criminally for spreading disinformation. Because this kind of thing not only costs lives but when it doesnt kill it leaves a plethora of collateral damage (see polio) that overloads the health system and makes innocent peoples lives miserable. And what’s worse, it hits children hard because they don’t have autonomy to choose to protect themselves and they may end with a whole life of pain because their parents chose to believe some idiot posting anti-vax stuff. Again, see polio.
You see, the first tests with vaccines are from 1798 or so, we have over 2 centuries of evidence showing vaccines are plenty safe. You can question efficacy of newer methods such as the mRNA thing provided you present scientific evidence and not lone debunked AND retracted bogus studies (eg: the autism idiocy). Vaccines are generally good and should be taken whenever available unless you have specific conditions that are also described in scientific literature. We actually should take vaccines to protect those who can’t by herd immunity (another scientifically proven concept).
To wrap it up, I think we should put the full force of the law against this kind of idiocy. You wanna have full, absolute free speech? There you go. Just don’t expect not to suffer the consequences of spreading disinformation. Including but not limited to private companies not wanting to host your idiocy.
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It’s telling that every accusation of “censpring Covid triths” ever made has never once pointed to
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any truthful claims about covid that were “censored.”
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Those sour grapes have ages into vinegar looks like.
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How’s things in Bizarro World? Bizzarro… Bizzarro… Bizarro… Bizzarro… Bizzarro… Bizzarro… BIZZARRO…!1!!
Rebmahc fo Soehce deef ym dnim.
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How is that evidence that the government ordered or coerced Twitter to do anything about those accounts? Heck, this seems perfectly reasonable to ask what they do about anti-vaxxer accounts or offer assistance in identifying misinformation, which is what the meeting appears to be about. Nothing coercive about it.
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Fags on TechDirt working to harm victims of online harassment
I see a lot of fags on TechDirt who put their own profits ahead of the safety and protection of individuals online. That’s plain evil and immoral. Americans and citizens around the world deserve to be protected from doxxing, online harassment, and cyberstalking crimes. That means they deserve to hold ISPs and platforms accountable if they cannot locate the perpetrator. What about this is difficult to understand for the fags at TechDirt? This in turn means Section 230 needs to be repealed or amended to curb the liability shield for tech companies. They don’t deserve it. TechDirt needs to stop peddling false misinformation about Section 230. Your profits of internet entrepreneurs ranks behind the safety and protection of victims of cyberharassment. Hope the Supreme Court rules against Google in Gonzales v. Google and shuts you TechDirt pro-Section 230 fags up for good.
Re: On top of posting anonymously and attacking that as well...
Claims to be against harassment.
Uses anti-gay slur in their opening sentence and littered throughout their post.
It’s strange but somehow I’m finding it hard to believe that you are in fact against harassment.
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Why do you hate the First Amendment? After all, moderation is a form of speech, and Section 230 allows companies to moderate as they see fit.
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… hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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I love that you idiots are so stupid you don’t realise you can just comment without creating an account.
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Creating an account makes it much easier to track reactions to your postings.
For everyone. Price and prize.
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Love that this idiot assumes that those choosing to identify their posts are unaware of the anonymous option – as if the number of anonymous posts wasn’t a clue.
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That’s just how stupid the OP was. Congrats you played yourself.
Re: Look at rumpled foreskin over here.
Who even calls anyone a fag anymore? Are you stuck in 1992?
Re: Re:
Probably in Britain. Fags are for smoking there.
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Hate sex with dirty talking fascists, so dreadfully yummy.
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TechDirt is filled with pro-online harassment, pro-doxxing fags who support Section 230
I see a lot of fags on TechDirt who put their own profits ahead of the safety and protection of individuals online. Section 230 needs to be repealed, OK? Americans and citizens around the world deserve to be protected from doxxing, online harassment, and cyberstalking crimes. Free Speech doesn’t include cyberharassment. The government has a duty to protect victims from online criminals. That means they deserve to hold ISPs and platforms accountable if they cannot locate the perpetrator. What about this is difficult to understand for the fags at TechDirt? This in turn means Section 230 needs to be repealed or amended to curb the liability shield for tech companies. They don’t deserve it. TechDirt needs to stop peddling false misinformation about Section 230. Your profits of internet entrepreneurs ranks behind the safety and protection of victims of cyberharassment. Hope the Supreme Court rules against Google in Gonzales v. Google and shuts you TechDirt pro-Section 230 fags up for good.
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Fuck off, spambot.
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Profits? What profits? I think you are just making shit up which just makes you a lying stupid asshole with emotional problems who doesn’t understand anything.
How about you go an educate yourself: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/
Re: Re: Why don't you kindly fuck off Toom1275? Time to get sued bitch
Time to sue the fuck out of Big tech!
The fast motion implosion of one of late stage capitalism’s worst examples of excesses drew me here and I cannot wait to see what 2023 brings. Hopefully more than two billionaires losing billions of dollars as if a Gilligan’s Island coconut fell on their heads making them act inexplicably and providing us with mountain sized servings of schadenfreude.
Core ball is an addictive online game that you won’t be able to put down! Zigzag your device to higher ratings.