Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the FBI advisor who attacked Signal for its refusal to collect user metadata:
How dare you close the curtains, I was looking in those!'
I love how a company that collects as little as possible information on their users as they can get away with, and who is trying to get other companies to likewise collect less data is being held up as an example of technology overlords'. Let all cower in fear from the overlords that want less power over you!
One should always worry when a person or an organization places one value above all. The moral fabric of our world is complex. It's nuanced. Sensitivity to moral nuance is difficult, but unwavering support of one principle to rule them all is morally dangerous.'
Like perhaps the value' that the government should be able to access private data on whoever they want, which should be as extensive as possible, on demand?
Between Privacy is good, even if it protects bad people sometimes' and Privacy is terrible, scrap it so it's easier to go after bad people even if that screws over way more innocent people' I know which one I find less morally dangerous'.
In second place, it's Toom1275 with a comment about the old session of Congress's final bipartisan bill pressuring websites to do more censorship:
Reminder:
There has never once yet been a Section 230 is a problem and needs change/removal" argument that didn't rely on lying about what 230 does and how.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with another comment about Signal, this time from Thad passing on an excellent quote:
I remember Cory Doctorow having an analogy on the subject: There's a difference between privacy and secrecy. What I'm doing in the bathroom stall isn't a secret. But it is private. That's why there's a door on the stall."
Next, it's an anonymous comment about HBO Max and its ongoing elimination of popular content:
It's so baffling and goes completely against the entire point of mergers and consolidation.
I am reminded of Ed Lampert's disastrous reign over Sears which destroyed the company when he forced the internal divisions of the company to all compete with each other because of his free market" absolutism, and naturally it meant that the entire business just began consuming itself from the inside out in a self-destructive frenzy.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner comes from Stephen T. Stone on our post rounding up the yearly comment winners for 2022, where he made a clean sweep of the insightful category. Perhaps his stunned reaction has kicked off a push to do the same on the funny side this year?
wait
what
In second place, it's another comment from that post, this time from That One Guy in a thread where a discussion broke out about the supposed coercion revealed in the underwhelming Twitter Files:
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...
For editor's choice on the funny side, we've got a pair of comments about the Louisiana law requiring age verification for any site that contains more than one-third porn. Uriel-238 spotted a way around the issue:
Say, your site has 5000 porn videos.
You just also need to host 10,001 cat pics.
Meanwhile, wshuff wondered how this would impact Techdirt:
With all the Malibu Media and Prenda articles on this site, I'm sure it is more than 33% porn. Time to shut it down.
That's all for this week, folks!