Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone responding to the allegation that we have been inconsistent about whether or not Twitter blue checks have value:
The value of the blue check under Old Twitter was verification"-i.e., this person is who they say they are". Was the system perfect? No. Was it better than Elon's? Absolutely.
The blue check was never about creating a system of lords and peasants"-it was about making sure people who could be imitated by scammers (and people who could be misled by those scammers) didn't suffer that misfortune. Elon destroyed that system in favor of a system where anyone could buy a status symbol. But the symbol was always far less about status (social, economical, or political) than it was about identity.
Those fools who believed the check was about status bought into Elon's system. They got to discover first-hand how that purchase gave them a status-but not the one they thought they were buying. I both pity their naivete and relish in the schadenfreude.
In second place, it's That One Guy with a comment about Elon Musk's latest childish nonsense:
Elon: You PAID for that mark? What an idiot.'
And in a string of ongoing faceplants Elon took something that had value before he owned the company, stripped out all the value once he did, gave it negative value by associating it with him and then somehow found a way to dig down from there. That's almost impressive, albeit for al the wrong reasons.
Well that's one way to get your legal department some extra work, not to mention encourage famous people with millions of followers to start really looking for a social media platform that's not run by a hypocritical, tantrum throwing toddler pretending to be an adult.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with freakanatcha and another comment about Musk's confusion about verification:
Econ 101
Only recently did it dawn on Elon that he needs LeBron (and his 50MM followers) more than LeBron needs him.
Next, it's an anonymous comment about Missouri taking down its anti-trans snitch form:
This is the same state that exposed teacher SSNs and called using the F12 key on their website hacking."
Over on the funny side, both our top winners also come in response to Musk's flailing Twitter Blue efforts, including his restoration of the check mark to the accounts of dead celebrities. In first place, it's Pixelation with a simple analogy:
Elon
The dog that caught the car and refuses to let go of the tire as it keeps running him over. Thump, thump, thump...
In second place, it's Thad responding to the assertion that anyone who doesn't like it should just quit Twitter:
I'm pretty sure Michael Jackson already stopped using Twitter.
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the latest impossible online age verification bill (points scored for a great Star Trek reference):
Every single one of these bills...
....when it comes to explaining how they're supposed to accomplish the internally contradictory policies outlined within them, every single one of these bills just makes me thing of that classic Star Trek TNG scene where Q has been made mortal after being an effective god, and is trying to help them solve a problem in a system, and his explanation of how to solve the problem is
Simple, you just change the gravitational constant of the universe"
And how are we supposed to do that?"
I don't know, you just do it!"
Finally, we round things out with one last comment about verification on Twitter, this time from Zonker:
If the verified check isn't verified anymore, how are we going to know which Devin Nunes' Cow is really Devin Nunes' cow? Should we ask Devin Nunes' Mom?
That's all for this week, folks!