Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MathFox with a comment about the troubles at Truth Social:
What ‘Truth Social’ shows is how easy it is easy to create an Internet platform. It also shows how hard it is to make an Internet platform successful.
In second place, it’s Thad with a comment about Clarence Thomas gunning to overturn NY Times v. Sullivan:
I wonder why Clarence Thomas would want to make it easier to sue people who say damaging things about public figures.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment on our post about Facebook moderating posts that mention abortion pills:
Well the comments on this are definitely going to be… interesting. So let’s just head off a few of the strawmen right now.
1. This article did not in any way say that Facebook is not allowed to do this or that they should face criminal or civil penalties for doing so.
2. At no point were Trump supporters posts auto-removed simply for posting the words “Trump” or “Conservative”
3. It is not hypocritical to disagree with a particular moderation decision while still supporting their right to moderate
OK, carry on.
Next, it’s That One Guy with a comment about the ongoing attacks on digital ownership and the library model:
‘If libraries were not already a well established part of society they never would have been allowed to be formed.’
Modern publishers: ‘Challenge accepted.’
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Beefcake with a comment about the USPTO granting Ohio State a trademark on the word “the”:
This article illustrates that nothing is as definite as it used to be.
In second place, it’s Naughty Autie responding to a post about Nintendo’s IP bullying that mentioned “using Nintendo as something of a virtual punching bag”:
Careful, Tim. That’s Nintendo’s too. 😉
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got two more comments from That One Guy. First, it’s a response to Google giving in to GOP political spammers and launching a pilot program to whitelist them out of spam filters:
‘Oh no no no, you opted out of messages from giveusyourmoneyandvoteforus(at)politicalparty1, this message is from giveusyourmoneandvoteforusy(at)politicalparty2, totally different so the original opt-out choice doesn’t apply. If you want to opt out of this sender’s emails that’ll require marking this sender’s messages as undesirable, and this opt-out will of course not apply to tomorrow’s messages which will come from a totally different group that just so happens to have a very similar email address as ours.’
Finally, it’s a bit of sarcasm about objections to the idea that long copyright terms are necessary to motivate creators:
I don’t know what you’re talking about really, I mean I can’t imagine that I’m alone in having been utterly bereft of any interest in creating anything until I learned that my great grandchildren would be able to act as gatekeepers for it.
Indeed it was only after I learned that anything I created, built upon what had come before, would be locked up and kept out of reach of others that might want to continue the cycle of creativity that I had any interest in creating works at all, so I can safely say that setting copyright to last decades after I was turned into a pile of ashes was the real spark that fueled my creativity in the first place.
That’s all for this week, folks!
whoops! fixed, thanks
Could definitely package it up as a PC game. Mobile is a lot tougher - the interface doesn't currently support screens below a certain size, and it also relies on mouseover tooltips for conveying important (if technically not 100% critical) information.
Yeah - we certainly investigated engines (Twine and Inkle were our top contenders) but ultimately it seemed easier to get the functionality we wanted by building it ourselves
Nope, not Twine! No engine really - it's built in HTML/Javascript using the Vue.js framework, utilizing a little bit of the engine Randy Lubin (our game-making partner) built for his project StorySynth but mostly built from scratch.
whoops my bad, fixed!
Indeed. At some point that sentence was going to be "the one that won first place" and I guess the wrong word survived :) fixing!
whoops - fixed!
Unfortunately it was issues with the recording itself - not sure if it was the mic or the connection, but that audio is all we got. The only other real option was scrapping it entirely, and I figured the conversation was still worth putting out.
Sometimes, the ability to theoretically handle anything makes it labor-intensive to handle each specific thing :) There definitely is some stuff that seems like it should be easier - but so far, it's capable of doing everything, with effort. And of course, the data migration needs were a big part of the challenge: it wasn't just a matter of building these features, but building them in a way that allowed us to map everything from the old Techdirt onto the new one, with minimal disruption in the continuity of everything functioning, and the goal of a quick migration with up-to-the-minute data that wouldn't require a lengthy shutdown of the site. If we were building from the ground up for a new site, some things would have been easier - but we were also building for compatibility with the data (and just our user habits) from over 20 years of development on a entirely custom CMS with lots of idiosyncrasies and patchwork workarounds.
We'll definitely give consideration to A through D as we make changes. One thing I can answer now, which is E: it's named the Comment Scrubber after the tools used in audio/video software that show you a condensed waveform/thumbnail timeline and let you quickly shift to that point in the file by clicking. Those are called "scrubbers"! But - it is perhaps true that this terminology isn't clear to a lot of people.
WordPress customer service is definitely not lacking! You would not believe how much work they have done for us for two straight years to make this possible. I know Techdirt might seem "relatively simple" but the truth is, as blogs go, it's really not. We had added a lot of custom features over the years. Our comment voting/badges system is unlike any out-of-the-box solutions, the membership system is entirely custom tracking multiple different subscription tiers via integration with both Foxycart (for our direct purchase store) and Patreon, lots of our little features our non-standard on blogs these days (user preferences for site display, markdown in comments, the post expander) and some break common rules of modern CMS systems (infinitely-deep comment reply threads). And that's not even getting into some of our non-standard back-end features that we've developed for our editorial flow over the years. It required a lot of custom work to rebuild it all as a WordPress theme, and then there's the other huge issue: the data migration. Our entire data structure was non-standard, and not easily mapped to WordPress - it required development of a custom, multi-stage process to move over 75,000 posts and a couple million comments and reformat/retabulate everything in a new structure. The bugs we're seeing now are what remains after making so, so many difficult things work properly. And they certainly do have solutions for everything we're seeing, but some require special work due to all the aforementioned customization. All we can do now is continue to work steadily through them as best we can!
Personally, I would not describe it as a disaster
Hi Ehud - we are working as hard as we can to resolve all the issues. This site migration was a necessary thing for us, and some bugs were inevitable - and we have a very small team but we're doing what we can to make it as smooth as possible. We'll get your Crystal Ball restored ASAP - I'm sorry to hear that this brief disruption impacts your goodwill towards the site.
One of your replies was caught in an overactive spam filter (now cleared). And I see one more reply from you, and several other comments - not sure if there are others missing? We will continue looking into it.
Very strange - even in mobile it shouldn't look anything like that, so not sure why that's happening. We'll figure it out as soon as we can!
Woah! What browser/system are you on? You are getting major display issues there - that is nothing like how it's supposed to look.
Your comment with the pastebin link was caught in spam yeah (cleared now) - not sure if that was a freak accident or what, we'll be monitoring the issue of false positives and figure out how to tweak going forward.
Yeah - that system hasn't been in real use for a very long time, and we were having some issues with it in the transition, so we decided to deprecate for the time being. I know that sucks for some of our long-time users who had some old submitted stories in there, and I'm sorry about that! At some point we will try to bring it back if we can.
The issue may have to do with the fact that your memberships were bought with a different email address than your Techdirt account email, then activated on your Techdirt account. The system should be handling that, but it seems not to be in this case. If you still have access to the email that you bought the subscription with, you can check there - I think you will have gotten a new Activation email, allowing you to reactivate the subscription on your TD account. Feel free to do that, if you did! But this should have happened automatically so we're working on getting it fixed, too.
Variable width works, there's no hard limit! BUT the issue is with user preferences not being saved for non-logged-in users. Very sorry about that - as soon as we get that fixed it will work just like it used to.