Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the commendable-comments dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Rocky with a lengthy, structured response to a complaint about our coverage of Twitter:

“Trolling!? You must mean like gossiping about one minute service outages, and leading the readers to infer that the collapse of Twitter is imminent.”

A quick search for “twitter outage” gives some interesting results, here’s a handful of them:
* Twitter back after two-hour outage affected tweets – BBC News
* Twitter Outages Hit Users Worldwide – WSJ
* Twitter’s timelines stopped working this morning – The Verge
* Twitter down, social network suffers outage as users unable to access timelines – NY Post
* Twitter down for more than an hour around world – The Guardian

From the above we can critique your bad arguments:
* Major media sites all over the world reported on the outages isn’t “gossip” – lie #1
* Major outages worldwide for a couple of hours isn’t “one minute outages” – lie #2
* There have been 4 large outages so far this year which have been widely reported, taking that into account plus the above, any reader of TD or any other site reporting on Twitter can infer that the service is degrading steadily, not that a collapse is “imminent” – lie #3

Conclusion: You just made some dishonest shit up.

“While avoiding the other internet censorship headlines like the plague.”

This is an article about Twitter outages, not whatever you may think is important. If you think something is important enough to report on you can either submit a story or start your own site. You could also have added which stories you referred to, but considering what else you said I’ll just chalk it up fabulation or some stupid whinging stories where some assholes are complaining they got banned for being assholes.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about our post on Twitter forgetting about transparency reporting, and our assertion that it “doesn’t build trust, it builds up a cult of ignorant fools”:

While I don’t know Musk personally, From what I’ve seen, I suspect he doesn’t see a difference between the two.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from mick about the growing attacks on NY Times v. Sullivan:

It’s hysterical that DeSantis (and Trump!) want to do away with the SCOTUS decision that Fox is using as 100% of its defense in the Dominion case.

No Sullivan, no defense. lol

Next, it’s nerdrage responding to the Texas bill outlawing sites that offer abortion info:

oh really? let us recap

The targeted sites are:

(A) aidaccess.org;
(B) heyjane.co;
(C) plancpills.org;
(D) mychoix.co;
(E) justthepill.com; and
(F) carafem.org;

Pass it on, folks. Streisand Effect ftw.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Stephen T. Stone musing on the question of whether Musk and his team can right the rickety Twitter ship:

If I were a betting man, I’d bet on Musk. Granted, I’d bet on him to fail, but I’d still bet on him.

In second place, it’s pbryan back on the post about Twitter transparency (or increasing lack thereof):

Twitter and Musk could not be immediately reached for comment.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the Florida GOP’s latest attack on free speech:

The Florida GOP Seems Confused

I thought they were arguing that we had a First Amendment right to see the President’s son’s penis.

Then they argue that we don’t have a First Amendment right to mock a kid wearing a red hat.

Now they’re arguing that bloggers don’t have a First Amendment right to be anonymous.

Get it together, Florida.

Finally, it’s Anathema Device with a comment about the dismissal of another coal company CEO’s defamation lawsuit:

All Coalmine Owners Are Bastards.

That’s all for this week, folks!