Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the dialogue-log dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Jason with a response to a specific passage in Charles Harder's article complaining about cancel culture:
"I believe that less cancellation, and more thoughtful consideration of context—plus appreciation for viewpoints we disagree with, particularly when communicated in a respectful, law-abiding way—would benefit all of us.
That, sadly, represents the underlying disconnect.
If he says something that other people disagree with, well, that's his free expression and everyone else should be more tolerant and respectful of his opinion.
If someone says something he disagrees with, that's obviously a blatant and despicable crime and should therefore be punished.
In second place, it's JMT with a response to a particularly angry commenter complaining about Joe Biden "trying to make election fraud permanent":
Screaming incessantly about something will not make it become true, but hopefully it'll eventually give you a stroke.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from That One Guy about what we should expect from the DMCA:
Accuracy costs effort, sloppiness is free
With no penalty for bogus DMCA claims there's no incentive for accuracy, so the surprising thing isn't that such claims are made on a regular basis but that they don't happen more often.
Next, it's MightyMetricBatman responding to a question about the use of the term "dark patterns" to describe sketchy donation-raising tactics from Republicans:
I do not know if this comment was made in a trolly fashion or not, but I'll take the chance.
The study of what person looks at in website originated from the outgrowth of the theories of UI design in computer science. It was found to be criminally easy to design a user interface that would draw your eyes to some things and totally avoid others.
Since this type of study originates from computer science, they took terms from that field of study. In computer science, a "dark pattern" is a pattern in software engineering that makes iteration more difficult and more buggy as more and more is added onto the system.
User interface research took the term to refer to a user interface designed to make it harder or avoid understanding of the information being projected.
Dark patterns are not only pernicious in scams but regularly show up in contracts to hide things you would not ordinarily agree too. And the courts have generally encouraged it by being science illiterate as usual and responding "But the text was there." and ignore the entire study of what people look at on a screen or piece of paper.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous response to an aforementioned angry commenter, who complained all week about being caught in spam filters and demanded an explanation of why their "browser session stopped working" during a deluge of comments:
Even your browser is sick of your bullshit.
In second place, it's another anonymous comment regarding the latest ridiculous New York Times opinion piece about Section 230, in which the author expressed their desire to teach people to avoid misinformation online:
Mission accomplished! I will henceforth not read his columns!
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with another comment on that post, this time from Bloof who coined a new tagline for the NYT opinion pages:
Ah the NYT op ed column, where the rich, pompous and privileged go to be wrong in public.
Finally, because one commenter's complaints about supposedly being censored were so fervent this week, we close with a response from Rocky suggesting a diagnosis of the problem:
Troll beset by gremlins
Have you considered that maybe your computer is infested by gremlins? Or just perhaps, it's a common PEBKAC?
That's all for this week, folks!
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