Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is radix with a summary of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's comments about the blackout protest:

We don't do things for free, so all the unpaid mods should get back to work" is quite the statement.

In second place, it's miked with some additional info on the nature of the protest:

Nobody Mentions Why the Mods Are Upset

Almost all of the reporting, including here, has missed the reason why moderators are upset.

Reddit does not provide a viable way for the mods to actually moderate. The official apps are garbage which gave rise to many 3rd-party apps. These 3rd-party apps give the moderators the tools needed to provide free work for reddit. Charging everyone for API access makes the apps too costly to run.

Now, moderators will have to use the official apps slowing down their work. This will result in more spam and hate-speech, especially in the large forums.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with Firehawke and some thoughts on what comes next:

This has become a major trust issue now. I (and I imagine a lot of other Reddit users) can no longer trust Reddit's management to do the right thing at all- they've clearly crossed a ethical line with the threats alone, much less the refusal to deal with the situation with any honesty.

I think even if the protests end, this will have left enough of a bad taste in users' mouths to want to look into moving on to a different site. I'm certainly looking at my options; about the only thing that could possibly change my mind now would be for them to do a full apology, drop their CEO, and work with the community on a more fair approach.

That's not going to happen, clearly.

Next, it's That One Guy with a comment about the secret shareholders of X Holdings Corp:

Strange, you'd think such a huge believer in free speech(to the point of removing the block feature on Twitter) would be proud to put his name and all the other free speech champions on paper for the world to see.

Can't imagine why they wouldn't want people to know who owns the platform now, not like there's likely to be any conflicts of interest or anything.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment connecting Steve Huffman's recent interviews with an old one in the New Yorker:

Huffman's attitude about the contributions and free labor of the Reddit community quite clearly echos what he said in 2017 when talking about prepping for potential civilizational collapse scenarios and how he thinks community is important to survival. He recognizes the value, and believes it should operate to benefit him:

Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I'm a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove."

The second place winner is part of some ongoing riffing that happened in response to another comment, so we're going to switch the order up and give the context with some editor's choices. First, it's Samuel Abram getting things started with thoughts on those redacted X Holdings Corp shareholder names:

Maybe all those black boxes don't represent the 95 stakeholders of X but rather X's one stakeholder: the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Next, for the last editor's choice, it's the first anonymous reply to that comment:

HAL would run Twitter a lot better.

And that brings us back around to our second place winner for funny, which is another anonymous reply:

My god, it's full of shit.

That's all for this week, folks!