Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the chit-chat dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 with a reaction to our post about Substack CEO Chris Best’s failure to answer some important basic questions:
The data
First, this is the most sharply concise confrontation with a CEO I have ever seen on this issue and I appreciate the author for having curated it.
What upsets me here, however, is Best’s cynical claim that efforts to censor hate speech is pointless:
“And my read is that that hasn’t actually worked. That hasn’t been a success. It hasn’t caused those ideas not to exist. It hasn’t built trust. It hasn’t ended polarization. It hasn’t done any of those things. And I don’t think that taking the approach that the legacy platforms have taken and expecting it to have different outcomes is obviously the right answer the way that you seem to be presenting it to be.”
First, he is missing the point, completely – it’s not about “ending” bad ideology – it’s about preventing it from metastasizing. There will always be Nazis. The least we can do is limit its reach through some kind of corporate ethics.
Second, he cannot make any kind of claim that “censorship doesn’t work” unless there is some kind of legitimate study that measures some degree of influence (don’t ask me how) under conditions “X” versus conditions “Y.” He’s just being lazy.
In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone replying to a comment that offered a strange claim about Musk having no choice but to globally block posts at the behest of the Indian government:
Musk made a decision to block certain tweets from being viewed outside of the jurisdiction of a given legal order. So far as I know, the power of the Indian government ends at the borders of India. What right does India have to tell a U.S. citizen that they shouldn’t be able to view tweets that criticize the Indian government?
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with two more comments about the Chris Best interview. First, it’s Dr. Fancypants, Esq. with a small observation:
“Gotcha” questions
This is a drop in the bucket of this problematic interview, but it’s fascinating to see Chris use “gotcha question” to just mean “question I’m unprepared to answer”. That’s a tic I strongly associate with GOP politicians.
Next, it’s K’Tetch with some longer thoughts:
Chris’ Moderation Problem
I think the moderation problem isn’t address here, because Chris Best doesn’t have a handle on what the actual problem is. If he uses his product (I don’t know, I don’t bother with them) then it’s as a content producer, and if he looks at some, he’s looking at it probably on an internal system, perhaps with internal filters applied to remove a lot of the scum (like looking at a NYT piece with the comments set to ‘NYT recommended only’.
As ‘CEO’ he’s never had to get down in the weeds, and spend hours doing the content moderation work. I spent 15 years doing it at TorrentFreak and it’s horrible soul-destroying work. You see things far less in terms of simplistic right and wrong. Sometimes things look bad on first glance but are redeemed when taken in context. Some things look ok on their own but then look terrible in greater context (such as a string of comments in a thread that collectively push a strong anti-semetic screed.
I think he assumes that ‘bad comments’ are along the lines of 4chan shitposting, and not some of the vitriol that’s out there now, some posing as reasonable arguments.
Seriously, him going ‘undercover boss’ (but not really) in the trenches in the content moderation team might open his eyes to reality. Might open the eyes of all kinds of CEOs, because the musks, zucks, Neil Mohan, etc. might benefit from actually seeing and interacting with the bad comments directly, instead of being shielded from it by well-meaning protective underlings.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Samuel Abram with a classic response to the assertion that Elon Musk has “the maturity of a 15-year-old”:
HEY!!
That’s an insult to the maturity of 15-year-olds!
In second place, it’s Pixelation with a comment about the Musk-Taibbi fight:
Oh look, Musk censoring Taibbi. Twitter is really censoring right wing speech now. Time for the “conservatives” to call out Musk. Right?
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about attempts to copyright a rhythm:
I was going to finish reading this article, but then I realized Glyn was using words that someone else invented, so out of respect for the descendants of those people and their bank account balances, I can’t support this clearly unauthorized infringement. Also, please donate to my GoFundMe campaign so I can afford the license fees to use the words I’m currently typing.
Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about the Arkansas social media law:
Unnecessary Law
The new bill is unnecessary. The issue was fixed with the meat plant age verification bill!
The children are too busy at their jobs to use social media!
That’s all for this week, folks!
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
YEAH!
I won first place for funny! It’s a great start for this week for me!
Thanks everyone!
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
I had much better week.
1) got a new job
2) eat expensive steak as a reward
3) government has no teeth against me
4) salary is acceptable
5) told my parents some good news
6) my 3d engine is getting marketing push any day now
Re: Re:
Your lies aren’t going to win the Funny award, you know.
Re: Re: Re:
To be fair, he could have probably found a new job. From the very beginning it was incredibly obvious that Meshpage on its own was never Tero’s sole source of income or welfare checks. On the other hand he lives a full 15km from the nearest neighbor, so he says, and he generally distrusts other humans, so where he got “expensive steak” is something of a mystery.
The claim that the government has no teeth against him is funny, as it seems to allude the government had teeth against him before, when his sole complaint about the government of Finland was not using Meshpage enough. The likelier truth is that the government flat out does not know Tero Pulkinnen exists beyond a national registry and could not give a single solitary fuck to dedicate more resources tracking this lunatic. (Of course, that might change if someone were to let the government know that some loser is proposing organ harvesting and rape as a suitable penalty in copyright enforcement.)
No salary is going to be good enough for Tero given his demands. He has no news to give to his parents, and with how stingy he is plus how genius he thinks his London bus ad was, Meshpage is not going to see any kind of meaningful marketing push.
Re: Re: Re:2
Finland has a lot more to worry about than some psychopath suggesting crazy penalties for copyright infringement.
Unless, of course, the Shame of Finland’s new job is spying on Finland on behalf of Russia.
Re: Re: Re:3
Tero Pulkinnen has claimed several times that Russia started the invasion in the name of copyright for the sake of unpaid content creators. And as unlikely as that’s the case, I would not put it past him to sell his country to one of the least copyright-friendly ideological regimes if he thinks it just might have a non-zero chance of making him richer.
Re: Re: Re:4
Russia’s troll farms might not be getting the amount of western money projected to them by the russian elite.
Re: Re: Re:5
Troll farms? From the very beginning of the war it was obvious that Russia was not going to have the money to fund their military. If Russia had any kind of meaningful monetary clout they’d have probably wasted Ukraine a long time ago, and yet the bulk of reports on the war is that Russia’s war tech is woefully out of date. Russia is not going to send money to some has-been coder in Finland.
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Re: Re: Re:2
No need to ponder the mystery any longer. I can even tell the restaurant name and web page address so you can compare the steak ads to whatever your local place offers.
https://www.instagram.com/stefans_steakhouse/
Re: Re: Re:3
lol guy, anyone can find a restaurant’s Instagram page and post it. With how much you hate humans and giving them money, plus your argument that Meshpage only made you $58 over 10 years, no one believes that you’re the sort who goes and splurges on expensive meat.
Re: Re: Re:4
after getting a real job, don’t you think proper steak is deserved?
Re: Re: Re:5
For you? No, I don’t think so. Especially seeing that it took you ten years of wasted time on Meshpage, spending your $58 on a steak is not something that should be worthy of praise.
Re: Re: Re:6
1) the time is not wasted given that there’s actual output from the activity
2) steak is a good reward
3) getting a job happens so rarely that reward is warranted
4) $58 was always kinda low amount for such awesome work. But given that I own the copyright for meshpage, there’s at least 70 years time to increase the number.
Re: Re: Re:7
Remains to be seen. You’ve shilled Meshpage for a full decade now, citing its supposed potential as a game/animation engine, NFT generator and so on. The best you can come up with is laggy simulations that look like they were done in Adobe Fireworks 1.0.
While it’s arguable that there was “actual output” and therefore the time is technically not completely wasted, at a market rate of $58 made over 10 years (again, it bears repeating that the $58 was made based on you teaching other people you hate how to use another programming language, and not because someone paid membership fees for Meshpage), it’s not surprising very few would consider the time spent worthwhile.
Eh… congratulations on finally saying something agreeable and not batshit insane. It took you 7 years of trolling to get there, but copyright trolls somehow need to be constantly babied over basic decency.
In this market? Maybe. The global situation seems to be businesses simultaneously having no vacancies and complaining about a labor shortage. Realistically what they mean is “nobody wants to work for shitty pay and no protections”. I highly doubt it’s hard to get a job in Finland. But in your case considering you were counting on Meshpage to be your only job, and based on your own claims that nothing else has made you money, you really only have yourself to blame there.
“Awesome” is relative. I’ve seen college students come up with videogame and 3D rendering engines that run laps around Meshpage. Meshpage would maybe have been interesting three decades ago, but by 2023 standards nothing Meshpage does is actually groundbreaking.
Those 70 years are going to be after you’ve died, mind you. I don’t think you’re going to be enriched much after you and your parents have already become corpses.
Re: Re: Re:8
Except that YOU have not seen the sheer power of meshpage’s technology. The groundbreaking aspect comes along when you actually examine what the technology is capable of. You cannot get the right idea if you put lipstick to a pig and claim that that’s the groundbreaking stuff.
Re: Re: Re:9
The kind of web technology that needs users to turn off adblocking and enable all sorts of invasive plugins to work while crashing their browsers and machines. Yeah, I don’t think so. That’s a security nightmare just waiting to happen.
I will however note that despite you claiming to have secured publishing and game development deals that required several NDAs to be signed, you still haven’t made one more cent beyond the $58 you claim to have made over 10 years.
Re: Re:
Well, you clearly are less emotionally mature than a teenager.
And you had the advantage of finishing puberty too.