Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of 2022 At Techdirt

Happy new year, everyone! 2022 has ended, and that means it's time for a look at the funniest and most insightful comments of the year at Techdirt. As usual, we'll be honoring the top three winners in both categories, as well as taking a rare look at the list of comments that performed best when the votes from both categories are combined. If you'd like to see the winners for this week only, you can go check out first and second place for insightful, and first and second place for funny. Now, let's get started!

The Most Insightful Comments Of 2022

Well, well, well... we've got a clean sweep of the insightful category in 2022! So let's all take a moment and pay our respects to Stephen T. Stone, a common fixture of the weekly winners and a constant source of comments that our audience deems insightful. Stephen took all three top spots in this year's rankings (though interestingly his comments don't appear anywhere else in the top ten). Thanks for keeping the comment section lively and full of insight, Stephen! Let's take a look at the winning comments.

For the first place comment, we head all the way back to January, when some totally bogus DMCA takedowns from giant publishers managed to completely nuke an entire book review blog. This happened amidst an unrelated right-wing freakout online, and Stephen racked up the insightful votes by connecting the two incidents:

To everyone who thinks AT&T dropping OANN is censorship": No, this is censorship.

The next two comments are also from earlier in the year, both coming in during the month of March. The second place winner is related to a tragically, maddeningly common incident: the cops killing a man who repeatedly told them he couldn't breathe, after they pulled him over for driving under the influence. Predictably, some despicable cop apologists tried to blame the victim, Edward Bronstein, with one commenter flippantly saying maybe don't drive under the influence". Stephen racked up the votes with the correct response to such nonsense:

Yes or no: Should drunk driving be a death penalty offense?

Corollary: Should that sentence be carried out at the moment of arrest rather than after a proper trial, verdict, and appeals process?

For the third place winner, we head to our post about Russia beginning preparations for disconnecting from the global internet and creating a Russian splinternet, during the early weeks of its invasion of Ukraine. Stephen's winning comment raised an important point that is applicable to most situations where regular people are caught up in the violence of global politics:

A reminder:

The people most hurt by war always have the least to do with causing it.

And that's that for the insightful side. Before we move on, one more round of applause for Stephen T. Stone! Now, the funny stuff...

The Funniest Comments Of 2022

No clean sweep on this side, but we kick things off with our first anonymous winner of the year. What's more, the anonymous first place comment also racked up a lot of Insightful votes, elevating it to the top of the combined-vote leaderboard as well. This time, it's from a post back in February, about the LA Sheriff making defamation threats against the city council for calling his deputies gang members. Our anonymous winner honed in on a specific comment from the Sheriff - My personnel routinely place themselves in harm's way while serving our community and ask nothing in return, other than a paycheck and maybe a little respect for the tough job they perform" - and offered up a response deemed by our readers as very funny, and very insightful:

You heard it here, folks!

Sheriff Villanueva has made it clear: they only need a paycheck and a little respect.' Therefore, they no longer need:

• Qualified Immunity
• Special treatment in misconduct investigations.
• Military-grade weapons and equipment.

Your honesty, sir, is a credit to your profession.

Following our truly anonymous first place winner, we've got our resident not-exactly-anonymous commenter in second place: That Anonymous Coward. This time, we head almost to the very beginning of the year, with our post on January 3rd about the court telling some Proud Boys that raiding the Capitol Building is not protected by the First Amendment. That Anonymous Coward racked up the funny votes with a decidedly unsurprised reaction:

They are proud boys.... not smart boys.
One also has to wonder what 1st Amendment lawyers are calling the idiot who filed this thinking it would work.

For our third funniest comment, we finally move a little later in the year, to Mike's now-somewhat-iconic (and prophetic) November post offering to help Elon Musk speedrun the content moderation learning curve following his acquisition of Twitter. Michael Barclay swooped in with the very first comment on the post, then sat back and collected the funny votes:

Dante only had **nine** circles of hell

Congratulations, you more than doubled Dante's nine circles of hell.

And that's that for our two big categories! But, as promised, let's take a look at the combined leaderboard...

The Top Comments Of 2022 For Insightful & Funny Votes Combined

As noted, the first place winner on the funny side was also the first place winner when you add in the insightful votes. But the next two stand alone, and bring us our only other anonymous winner this year! In second place for combined votes, it's a recent comment about Elon Musk's Thursday night purge of journalists on Twitter. Our anonymous winner combined insight and comedy in response:

For all the people who came and screamed that Twitter was moderating based on political viewpoints, will come here and admit that it never was and this is what true viewpoint discrimination looks like.

But alas, I haven't seen a flying monkey yet.

Next, in third place for combined votes, we have a comment from Toom1275 that is actually rather similar in spirit. In June, the US Postal Service was sued for seizing defund the police" face masks, and much like the second place winner, Toom noted how this appeared to be exactly the kind of infraction that certain groups were always freaking out about when they hadn't actually happened:

Oh look, an actual rights violation by an actual common carrier.

And with that, we close the books on 2022! Once again, I'm grateful to all our commenters for supplying so much great material for both the weekly and yearly posts. Happy new year, and I can't wait to see what you come up with in 2023!