Techdirt 2021: The Stats.

from the closing-the-books dept

Every year, a few days after New Years (once the data is truly complete), I try to do a post exploring some of the traffic patterns and comment details on Techdirt for the year. This year's will be a bit different on the traffic front, because at the end of last January, we took Google Analytics off the site, and that had been the tool we'd used to see where people were coming from and whatnot. Instead, this year for the details on where people are coming from and what technology they're using, we'll be using a combination of a self-hosted Matomo instance and Plausible Analytics (not self-hosted; though we're hoping to eventually switch to the self-hosted version). We ran all three solutions for one month before turning off Google Analytics, and the data roughly, though not exactly, matched (because all traffic numbers are fake and unreliable), but this year's info should be slightly different. As in the past, we're not reporting silly things like how much traffic we get, because (again), all those numbers are fake, due to dodgy tools and even dodgier bots and such. But we can get useful comparative data about where people are coming from and such.

Even though it relied on different analytics, if you'd like to see the older versions, here they are: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010.

The first thing we usually cover is where visitors are coming from -- and already we discover that with different tools, we get very different data. According to Plausible, our top five countries for visitors are the US at 70%, Canada at 5%, UK at 5%, Australia at 2% and India at 2%. Matomo has somewhat different results: US at 78%, UK at 6%, Canada at 3%, Australia at 2% and Germany at 1%. On Matomo, India actually comes in at number 15, rather than 5th on Plausible. Though Germany is 6th on Plausible. On Plausible the next four after Germany are France, Netherlands, Brazil and Sweden. On Matomo, the next five after Germany are France, Russia, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. Brazil, which came in 9th on Plausible shows up as 11th on Matomo. Russia, which shows up as 7th on Matomo is all the way down as 24th on Plausible!

I repeat: a lot of traffic numbers are garbage and no one knows anything! Last year we were surprised that Google Analytics said China was in our top 10, even though we had heard Techdirt was mostly blocked there. Matomo says that China gave us the 13th most visitors of any country, though Plausible says it's actually 42nd (though, it counts Hong Kong separately, and has that come 37th -- so perhaps if you combine the two...).

Moving on to what browsers people use, Chrome is still the leading tool for reading Techdirt. Matomo and Plausible seem to measure browser info in slightly different ways, but it does appear that somewhere around 45% of our traffic is from Chrome (Matomo breaks it down into different versions of Chrome) and somewhere between 25 and 32% from Safari. Firefox is somewhere between 8 and 12%. Interesting to note that most of the Safari traffic is from mobile (so, iOS) whereas most of the Chrome traffic is from a computer. There is still decent amount of mobile Chrome and desktop Safari, but it's a lot more of the alternative. Microsoft Edge is around 4% according to both platforms. DuckDuckGo's privacy browser is a new entrant this year, with both systems saying about 2% of our traffic is coming from there (which is cool to see). Both Opera and Samsung's browser get about 1% each. Matomo claims that there were 126 different browsers used to visit Techdirt last year, which is quite something.

In terms of operating systems, Windows at 32% beat out iOS at 26%, Android at 24% and Mac at 14%. Linux variations were about 3% and Chrome OS was a bit under 1%. The two analytics systems seem to agree that about 48% of our traffic was from desktops/laptops, with 52% coming from phones/tablets. Incredibly, a tiny fraction of people apparently visited Techdirt from gaming consoles, TVs, or car browsers (?!?).

Every year I'm interested in, generally speaking, where visitors are coming from. While other sites spent lots of time "gaming" social media sites for traffic, we've always avoided that. I'm not against getting such traffic, but I don't want to be reliant on it. So I'm always most interested in how much of our traffic is coming directly from people choosing to be here, and that continues to remain high, with 52% of our traffic coming from "direct" visits, 26.5% from search, only 14.2% from social media, and another 6.5% from other websites:

As for social media traffic, Twitter is the biggest single provider, with 55.6% of social media traffic coming from the bird site. Facebook provides 18.3% of the social media traffic, barely edging out Reddit by a barely noticeable number of visits. Hacker News comes in 4th at 6.3%. Everything beneath that is negligible, but if you must know, it's LinkedIn, YouTube, and Telegram after the top four.

Google (84%) provides the majority of our search traffic (again, which is 26% of our overall traffic), followed by DuckDuckGo (10%), Bing (3%) and Yahoo (1%). If you mash social and search together, Google provides us the most traffic, followed by Twitter, Reddit, DuckDuckGo, then Facebook, HackerNews and Bing.

And... now we get to the lists.

Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2021:

1. As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
2. Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
3. Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act
4. How The US Government Legally Stole Millions From Kim Dotcom
5. The Bizarre Reaction To Facebook's Decision To Get Out Of The News Business In Australia
6. Michigan State Police Officials Are Dodging Public Records Obligations By Using Encrypted Messaging Apps
7. The Neighbors Are Watching Via Surveillance Video
8. Techdirt Is Now Entirely Without Any Google Ads Or Tracking Code
9. Florida Sheriff's Office Now Notifying People It Will Be Inflicting Its Pre-Crime Program On Them
10. Appeals Court Tells Lying Cop No 'Reasonable' Officer Would Think It's OK To Tear Gas Journalists For Performing Journalism

So... there are some oddities and surprises in that list. Four out of our top ten stories... are actually not from 2021! In fact, three out of the top four are not from 2021. That's... weird! In the past, every so often we've had an older story slip into the top 10 list, but having four show up is very, very odd. In fact, the Parler story was also the number three story from 2020. It went a bit viral in January, when Parler got a lot of attention after being kicked off of Amazon and out of the various mobile app stores. The "Hello, You've Been Referred..." is not that surprising, as that's taken on a life of its own and people now regularly link people to it on social media. These days, almost every time I come across someone spouting some nonsense about publisher v. platform, I'm relieved to see someone has already linked to my post. Service journalism.

The Kim Dotcom story is... from 2015. But it has snuck into the top 10 list in the past. In 2018, it also made a surprise appearance. Dotcom has had a pinned post on his Twitter linking to that story for years, so whenever he goes viral, that story tends to go viral as well.

Now, the oddest one of all: the 7th ranking story, the Neighbors are Watching Via Surveillance Video... is from 2003. And, honestly, until I was going through the stats to put together this list, I had no idea that it somehow had received a flood of attention. I don't check stats that closely during the year, and am perplexed as to how or why this article from 18 years ago is suddenly in our top ten list. Here's the other oddity: as far as I can tell, it's not because of a bunch of traffic on a single day or two, but steady traffic from some sort of search (though it's not clear what keyword is leading people to it) every damn day of the year. And not just Google. The search referral to that one story matches our general breakdown: Google searches supplied 88% of the traffic to that story, DuckDuckGo supplied 7%, and Bing supplied another 2%. On an average day it doesn't get anywhere near the traffic of a new story, so I'd be unlikely to notice it. But it gets just enough traffic every single day that it's in our top 10! I also see that comments continue to pour in on that story, which now has over 650 comments (though not that many in 2021). It appears that this has been a low-level traffic collector for a while now... I mean, in some ways, the story is interesting, in that it was a very early reporting on neighbor's using surveillance cameras to help police -- something that is now happening regularly via Ring and Nest cameras and the like. But I will admit that I am at a complete and total loss as to how or why that story gets so much traffic every day.

2021's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:

1. Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter 679 comments
2. The Flopping Of Trump's Blog Proves That It's Not Free Speech He's Upset About; But Free Reach 473 comments
3. Texas Legislature Says You Can't Teach About Racism In Schools, But Social Media Sites Must Host Holocaust Denialism 458 comments
4. Judge Ignores First Amendment, Misreads Town Law, While Ordering Resident To Remove 'Fuck Biden' Signs 452 comments
5. Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch 427 comments
6. A Few More Thoughts On The Total Deplatforming Of Parler & Infrastructure Content Moderation 393 comments
7. Modder Solves 'GTA Online' Loading Time Problem, Gets Paid By Rockstar For It 346 comments
8. Changing Section 230 Won't Make The Internet A Kinder, Gentler Place 339 comments
9. Game Publishers: If Your DRM, Anti-Cheat Software Does Creepy Installs, Warn Your Customers First 314 comments
10. Florida Steps Up To Defend Its Unconstitutional Social Media Law And It's Every Bit As Terrible As You'd Imagine 288 comments.

Huh. So the first few on that list are perhaps predictable, but then it goes off in directions I wouldn't have expected. Once again, we see little overlap between the stories that get the most traffic and those that get the most comments, which always strikes me as worth noting (people always assume otherwise).

Okay, okay, I know what people are really waiting for are the comment leader boards...

2021 Top Commenters, by comment volume:

1. PaulT: 3419 comments
2. Stephen T. Stone: 2918 comments
3. Scary Devil Monastery: 2636 comments
4. That One Guy: 2334 comments
5. Lostinlodos: 1851 comments
6. That Anonymous Coward: 1301 comments
7. Toom1275: 1185 comments
8. Samuel Abram: 1172 comments
9. tp: 977 comments
10. ECA: 976 comments

The top four people are the same top four as last year, though in different order. PaulT returns to the top spot he last held in 2018. A couple of "new entrants" into the list this year, from two individuals who seem to spend more time arguing with the long time commenters, which seems to have contributed to their comment totals...

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the light bulb icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the lightbulb

1. PaulT: 907 comments (26.5%)
2. That One Guy: 905 comments (38.8%)
3. Stephen T. Stone: 742 comments (25.4%)
4. Scary Devil Monastery: 254 comments (9.6%)
5. That Anonymous Coward: 246 comments (18.9%)
6. Toom1275: 232 comments (19.6%)
7. Mike Masnick: 201 comments (45.6%)
8. Bloof: 191 comments (43.12%)
9. Samuel Abram: 147 comments (12.5%)
10. Thad: 118 comments (26.5%)

Those top three really dominated the leadership boards again, as they've done for a few years now. Thank you for contributing such regularly insightful comments.

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the LOL icon

1. Stephen T. Stone: 91 comments (3.1%)
2. That One Guy: 56 comments (2.4%)
3. That Anonymous Coward: 38 comments (2.9%)
4. Thad: 31 comments (7.0%)
5. Toom1275: 28 comments (2.4%)
6. Bloof: 25 comments (5.6%)
7. PaulT: 21 comments (0.6%)
8. Samuel Abram: 18 comments (1.5%)
9. Jojo 13 comments (12.4%)
10. Norahc: 11 comments (10.4%)

As always, we've seen that it's much, much more difficult to get the coveted "funny" vote. Also, for the previous two years, we had noted that Norahc had come on strong as someone who commented less frequently than others, but had a really high percentage of comments voted as funny. This year, Norahc's percentage of funny comments was even higher than the previous two years, but... newcomer Jojo stole the show by edging out Norahc with an even higher percentage of the funny vote.

And, with that, the 2021 books are closed, and 2022 is well underway. As noted in my final post of the year for 2021, we've got some decently big changes coming up soon, which should make the comments an even more fun place, so stay tuned...

Filed Under: 2021, comments, stats, techdirt

Introducing The Techdirt Insider Discord

from the join-us dept

Join the Insider Discord with a Watercooler or Behind The Curtain membership!

Techdirt has been around for nearly 25 years at this point, and we have an unfortunate habit of being just slightly too far ahead of the technology curve. The site was launched before the word blog even existed, and certainly before there were readily available and easy to use tools for creating a blog (more on that soon!), so we cobbled together our own solution. We've done that with unfortunate frequency. In the early 2000s, we even built our own internal RSS reader in order to find stories (I always thought it was better than Google Reader). And, a while back, we launched the Techdirt "Insider Chat" long before Discord or Slack or other such tools were popular.

The Techdirt Insider Chat was a widget on our site that, if you supported us at certain levels in our own Insider Shop (or on Patreon), you got access to a chat that only those supporters could use -- but which was still displayed on the sidebar for anyone to see. Because there weren't widespread tools to make this possible, we built our own. But it was a bit clunky and limited, and honestly wasn't receiving that much use beyond a handful of dedicated users.

Over the last few months, we've moved the Insider Chat over to Discord, which has become the standard these days for community chats. However, we did want to still include the feature of displaying the chat publicly -- but only allowing actual supporters to participate. So while we are now using Discord as the basis of the chat (which is much easier for many people to use, has many more features, and allows for things like accessing the chat on mobile devices), we built our own embeddable widget that reflects the chat in the sidebar (which you can see if you look over to the right).

If you're interested in (1) supporting Techdirt and (2) joining in on the conversations now happening in the chat and (3) connecting with others in the Techdirt community, please consider supporting us at a level that includes the Insider Chat.

As you'll recall, earlier this year we removed all the ads (and Google tracking code) from Techdirt. We are relying more and more on our community supporting us going forward, and we're working hard to provide those supporters with more useful and fun features, including this new Discord community.

Filed Under: chat, insider chat, techdirt
Companies: discord, techdirt

Plagiarism By Techdirt: Our Plagiarized NFT Collection Can Now Actually Be Bid On

from the sorry-about-that dept

Place your bids on the Plagiarism NFT Collection by Techdirt »

A few weeks ago, we wrote about our latest experiment with NFTs (which is part of the research we're doing into NFTs for a deep dive paper I'm working on). There's a very long explanation to explain the NFTs in question and why we're plagiarizing Prof. Brian Frye (but making them much, much cooler). But, after we posted that, we discovered one little problem. The platform that we were using, OpenSea (the most popular and user friendly NFT marketplace)... didn't work. At least not for us. We've spent 3 weeks asking OpenSea to fix things and last night they finally figured out the problem, so that you can now (finally) actually bid in the open auction for our plagiarized set of NFTs about plagiarism.

There are tons of reasons to back them -- some good, some less good -- but at the very least, it will help support Techdirt, it will show that culture works by building on those who came before, not by locking up content, and it will let you experiment with NFTs if you haven't already. Also, it'll let you show how maybe people shouldn't freak out over plagiarism all the time -- and when else do you have a chance to do that?

The entire collection can be seen here, and they do look amazing, if I do say so myself.

Filed Under: brian frye, nfts, plagiarism, techdirt

Techdirt 2020: The Stats.

from the closing-the-books dept

Every year a few days after New Years we post some stats about traffic and comments to effectively close the books on the year. I know that lots of sites do this prior to the end of the year, but we always wait until the new year is really here to make sure we have all the actual stats. I had meant to do this last week, but last week was a bit crazy and it kept me a bit busier than the average "first week of January." So, we're running a bit late here. If you'd like to see all such previous posts, they are here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010.

Also... a bit of an announcement. In all likelihood this will be the last year that we use Google Analytics for these stats. Over the last few months, we've been experimenting with a variety of analytics platforms that are more privacy focused, and we are likely to switch over entirely to them in the coming weeks. I don't know for sure, but it's likely we will turn off Google Analytics on this site relatively soon. As we've always said, though, nearly all analytics and traffic numbers are complete garbage, as they cannot distinguish between bots and real people, and many people chose to block analytics programs (especially Google). That's why we stopped reporting absolute numbers in these posts, because we knew they were not accurate. Instead, we do use them to tell relative numbers about which stories got the most traffic overall.

We'll start, as per usual, with where people are coming from. The top of this list tends to stay pretty much the same year in and year out. The majority of our traffic is from the US, not surprisingly. It's almost always between 67% and 70% of our traffic. This year, it was 69.6% of our traffic. The UK was second at 6.1%. Canada was next at 5.1%, then Australia, India, Germany, France, China, the Netherlands and Finland. The surprise here... is China. We've noted in past years how little traffic we get from China, and have received reports of being blocked there. However, it seems like we got a decent amount of traffic from there this year (about 0.8% of overall traffic). I'm not sure why. We did have a bunch of stories about TikTok, so perhaps that has something to do with it. China's entry seems to have pushed Sweden out of the top 10.

Chrome remains the main browser people use to visit the site, but once again that percentage is dropping (it did that last year too). In 2018 it was about 50% of our visitors came via Chrome. Last year it was 45%. This year it's down to 40%. Interesting... interesting... interesting. Safari has picked up much of the slack, jumping from 17% in 2018 to 22% last year and 28% this year. Seems like a trend worth watching. The next two browser listings are interesting: it's Android webview (12%) and Safari In-App at 7%. Arguably you could lump those with Chrome and Safari, but those are both the versions that people see on their mobile phone when they come across our story in another app, like Nuzzel or something. Firefox is hanging in there at 4.5% (down from 6% last year and 10% the year before). Internet Explorer usage continues to dwindle and now it's close to 1%. Microsoft Edge isn't really picking up the slack as it's at 1.8%. And I see Opera hanging in there at 0.5%.

On the operating system side, iOS now dominates, with 32% of our traffic coming from iOS devices. Another 31% is from Android. Those two have been neck-and-neck for years -- but always came below Windows. However, the era of mobile Techdirt has really taken over, and now Windows comes in 3rd with 23% of our traffic, and MacOS is at exactly 10%. Linux lovers are still there at 2.5%, and Chromes OS at just a bit under 1%. A small, but still surprising, amount of visits came from BlackBerry, Playstation 4, and Xbox.

As you can tell from the previous paragraph, mobile continues to grow. Last year was the first year we had more mobile visits that desktop, going from 39% to 55% from 2018 to 2019. In 2020 it was up to 64% (61% phone and 3% tablet). It's really quite amazing how quickly and how massively that shift has occurred. By device, the iPhone dominated the mobile traffic, which isn't surprising. The iPad was second. And from there a looooooong list of Samsung devices with a few Google Pixels thrown in along the way.

Every year we highlight this chart on the source of our traffic (next year's will likely look different, since our new analytics systems don't seem to have an exactly equivalent chart, but I should be able to piece together something similar). What's interesting to me is how similar this one is to last year's. Direct traffic is exactly the same as a percentage. Search traffic went down a bit, while social traffic went up a bit. But, as I always say, our focus has never been playing the games most other sites play to get traffic from social, and we prefer to build up loyal readers, and so the percentage of people coming direct has always been the most important to me. Those are our true supporters and fans. Indeed, people who come directly to the site spend significantly more time on the site and visit more pages than those coming from search, and especially social. People coming via social spend the least amount of time on our site, and visit the fewest pages.

In terms of outside sites that do send us traffic, we have a new one atop the leaderboard -- and this was a surprise to me as I've never even really been aware of it: SmartNews, which is a mobile news aggregator, sent the most (non-search) traffic to our site last year. Huh. If you read Techdirt via SmartNews, tell us about it. I was unaware it was even a thing. After that comes Twitter (with almost as much traffic as SmartNews), then Reddit, followed by Facebook, HackerNews, and the Drudge Report (?!?). In terms of search traffic, Google obviously provides the most, but DuckDuckGo and Bing both provide a surprising amount (and sent almost identical amounts of traffic to us last year).

The top search terms are always bizarre to look at. After variations on "Techdirt" our top search terms for traffic were... Addison Cain, Parler, Shiva Ayyadurai, Who Invented Email, FBI Surveillance Van Wifi, the Social Dilemma, and can you plagiarize yourself. I'll let you make of that what you will.

And now we get to the fun part. The lists!

Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2020:

1. Volunteers 3D-Print Unobtainable $11,000 Valve For $1 To Keep Covid-19 Patients Alive; Original Manufacturer Threatens To Sue
2. Trump Promises To Defund The Entire Military, If Congress Won't Let Him Punish The Internet For Being Mean To Him
3. As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
4. Trump Campaign Gets Laughed Out Of Court For Claiming A Bunch Of Unvetted Webform Submissions Is 'Evidence' Of Voter Fraud
5. President Trump Is So Upset About This Ad Showing His Failed Handling Of COVID-19 That He's Demanding It Be Taken Down
6. Florida State Police Raid Home Of COVID Whistleblower, Point Guns At Her & Her Family, Seize All Her Computer Equipment
7. SoftBank Owned Patent Troll, Using Monkey Selfie Law Firm, Sues To Block Covid-19 Testing, Using Theranos Patents
8. Court Tells Lying Cops That Someone Asserting Their Rights Isn't 'Reasonably Suspicious'
9. Mitch McConnell Using Section 230 Repeal As A Poison Pill To Avoid $2k Stimulus Checks
10. Cable TV Execs Move Past Denial Stage, Now Fully Expect A 'Cord Cutting' Bloodbath

Pretty good mix of stories, though way too many stories about the president out of control. One hopes we'll have fewer such stories this year. I know a lot of people continue to link and send traffic to my you're wrong about Section 230 post, so for those interested, that one came in at number 16 on the year.

2020's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:

1. As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like: 772 comments.
2. Disney+ Titles Disappear Without Warning, Bringing Confusion To The Streaming Wars: 570 comments
3. DHS Move Ahead With Plan To Harvest DNA Samples From Nearly Everyone Detained By ICE And CBP: 546 comments
4. So Wait, People Really Think The Barr DOJ's Investigation Into Google Is In Good Faith?: 515 comments
5. Copyright In The Modern Era: Fortnite Lets Players Mute Emote To Avoid Auto-Copyright Claims Against YouTubers: 432 comments
6. Harper's Gives Prestigious Platform To Famous Writers So They Can Whine About Being Silenced: 413 comments
7. Trump Campaign Gets Laughed Out Of Court For Claiming A Bunch Of Unvetted Webform Submissions Is 'Evidence' Of Voter Fraud: 342 comments
8. Anti-Vaxxer Sues Facebook, In The Middle Of A Pandemic, For 'In Excess' Of $5 Billion For Shutting Down His Account: 315 comments
9. Joe Biden Can't Tell The Difference Between The 1st Amendment & Section 230; Still Thinks Video Games Cause Violence: 291 comments
10. Mitch McConnell Using Section 230 Repeal As A Poison Pill To Avoid $2k Stimulus Checks: 289 comments

That first story, about Parler's content moderation practices, is amusing -- and I recommend potentially subscribing to the comment feed there. Every few days angry Parler supporters show up to whine and scream at us about how now we (we?) are getting a taste or our own medicine, and how of course Parler has to ban "leftists" because they're not serious -- without any of them ever (not once) recognizing that they're proving our point. Our point was not that Parler shouldn't moderate, but that it would and it would be subject to the same forces that make moderation inevitable (though, obviously over the past few days, that story has blown up in new ways as well).

It looks like we actually have two overlapping stories between the most trafficked and the most commented. And that's rare. Usually there's either none or just one. Also interesting to see that the last one on the list is a post from two days before the end of the year. Don't often see those top the comment charts.

And now the really fun part: the commenting leader boards:

2020 Top Commenters, by comment volume:

1. Scary Devil Monastery: 4099 comments
2. PaulT: 4013 comments
3. Stephen T. Stone: 3697 comments
4. That One Guy: 2768 comments
5. bhull242: 1594 comments
6. Uriel-238: 1216 comments
7. ECA: 1153 comments
8. Toom1275: 849 comments
9. Samuel Abram: 800 comments
10. Thad: 722 comments

By definition, most regular commenter readers should recognize those prolific regulars. I will admit to some surprise that SDM is in the top spot. Just from noticing comments, I would have bet that Stephen T. Stone would have retained the top spot he finally wrestled away from PaulT and That One Guy in previous years... but SDM (who was new to the list last year) leapfrogged all of them, and PaulT even pulled back ahead of Stephen.

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the light bulb icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the lightbulb

1. Stephen T. Stone: 1160 comments (31.4%)
2. PaulT: 1043 comments (26%)
3. That One Guy: 901 comments (32.6%)
4. Scary Devil Monastery: 266 (6.5%)
5. Michael Masnick: 223 comments (42.3%)
6. Uriel-238: 215 comments (17.7%)
7. Thad: 199 comments (27.6%)
8. bhull242: 152 comments (9.5%)
9. Toom1275: 128 comments (15.1%)
10. Anonymous Anonymous Coward: 120 comments (18.1%)

A lot of overlap from the most commented lists, but kudos to everyone for making insightful comments.

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the LOL icon

1. Stephen T. Stone: 94 comments (2.5%)
2. That One Guy: 57 comments (2.1%)
3. Thad: 40 comments (5.5%)
4. Norahc: 30 comments (9.6%)
5. Toom1275: 16 comments (1.9%)
6. Bloof: 16 comments (5.6%)
7. Koby: 14 comments (3%)
8. PaulT: 14 comments (0.4%)
9. Anonymous Anonymous Coward: 13 comments (2%)
10. Samuel Abram: 12 comments (1.5%)

Again, the community is much more stingy with funny votes than insightful votes (and certainly we see some using the "funny" vote lately as a sort of satirical vote on trollish commenters). Notably, last year we called out NorahC for having, by far, the highest percentage of funny comments of anyone who qualified, and they kept it up this year, and even had a higher percentage while posting more comments. That's impressive.

And... with that, the 2020 books are closed, and we've already got a huge number of 2021 comments. I ended last year's post by saying I was sure there would be plenty to talk about in 2020, but I, uh, underestimated just how comment worthy 2020 would be. Here's hopefully to a less eventful 2021, even as it's started off with a bang.

Filed Under: 2020, stats, techdirt

New Gear By Techdirt: That's Not How Any Of This Works

from the it's-really-not dept

Get your Not How This Works gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »

We deal with a lot of... incorrect takes here at Techdirt. Whether it's a technological issue, a business concept, a legal question, or some combination thereof, there's always someone espousing an idea that is wrong in almost every respect (see: the current discourse around Section 230). So today we're launching our latest line of Techdirt gear featuring a general purpose reply that we've found ourselves screaming (internally or otherwise) in many such situations: That's Not How Any Of This Works.

As always, both designs are available on t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and other apparel — plus various cool accessories and home items including buttons, phone cases (for many iPhone and Galaxy models), mugs, tote bags, notebooks, and of course face masks.

Check out this and our other gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »

Filed Under: gear, techdirt

Our New Monetization Experiment: Coil & The Web Monetization Protocol

from the check-it-out dept

As some of you know there have been no ads on Techdirt for the past few months or so, due to some issues with the way in which Google's AdSense program was run. We've been sorting through some possible options for some better advertising solutions and we may begin some new experiments shortly. In the meantime though, I want to thank everyone who has stepped up to support us in one way or another. I won't deny that losing the revenue from ads sucks, because it does, but we've always relied on a variety of other business models beyond ads as well.

The ad situation has caused a bunch of companies and projects to reach out to us about some other monetization ideas and options. Most of them were... not great. Or they were intrusive or annoying for you. But one that was quite intriguing was the idea of experimenting with Coil. Coil is working on creating an actual standard for web monetization, called the Web Monetization standard. It's being proposed as a W3C standard, and assuming that happens, then it wouldn't even just be connected to Coil any more. There are various ideas that have some similarities to what Coil is doing, but Coil is the only one I know of that is built around a standard that they hope will be adopted more widely and independently of Coil itself. It's also using the Interledger open protocol and you know how I feel about protocols.

So, how does it work? Well, as of last week, Techdirt is now "web monetized" with Coil. If you have a Coil account, which runs you $5/month, and the Coil browser extension, when you browse Techdirt, Coil will automatically deposit money into a wallet for us. It will also do that for a few other sites that are using Coil... including Imgur, Hackernoon and a bunch of Conde Nast sites like Wired (though, bizarrely, not Ars Technica). The more time you spend on Techdirt, the more we get, but it doesn't change how much you pay. And, also, it's not like we're going to try to keep you here any longer than usual.

Being realistic here: we don't expect this to be huge. In fact, we barely expect it to be small. But I still believe in the promise of the early web, built on open protocols and standards. Marc Andreessen, creator of the original graphical web browser and now the successful venture capitalist, has said multiple times that the original sin in creating the browser was the failure to build in monetization. Coil and the various other projects appear to be an attempt to rectify that -- and to me, that's worth supporting and experimenting with. I don't know where it will go, but if we can somehow help make it more widely adopted (and get a bit of support back in exchange) that seems like a good thing.

We're also brainstorming some other ideas around how we might use Coil in fun ways, so feel free to make some suggestions in the comments as well if you have any creative ideas. If you want to test it out, head on over to Coil and sign up. And let us know what you think.

Filed Under: ads, business models, open protocols, techdirt, web monetization
Companies: coil, techdirt

New Gear By Techdirt: Nerd Mentality & Nerd Immunity

from the nerd-harder,-harder dept

Get your Nerd Mentality and Nerd Immunity gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »

Our last t-shirt was a joke (not that we'd object to anyone buying it!) but today we've got a pair of real new additions to the Techdirt Gear store in the tradition of Nerd Harder, our most popular design. Introducing Nerd Mentality and Nerd Immunity!

As always, both designs are available on t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and other apparel — plus various cool accessories and home items including buttons, phone cases (for many iPhone and Galaxy models), mugs, tote bags, notebooks, and of course face masks.

Get your Nerd Mentality and Nerd Immunity gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »

Filed Under: herd immunity, nerd immunity, nerd mentality, techdirt, techdirt gear

Why Are There Currently No Ads On Techdirt? Apparently Google Thinks We're Dangerous

from the content-moderation-at-scale dept

You probably didn't notice it, but there are currently no third-party ads on Techdirt. We pulled them down late last week, after it became impossible to keep them on the site, thanks to some content moderation choices by Google. In some ways, this is yet another example of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. If we didn't know and understand how impossible content moderation at scale is to do well, we might be like The Federalist and pretend that Google's content moderation decisions were based on disagreement with our ideology. That would have allowed us to make a fake story like the one that is still getting news cycles, thanks to idiots in Congress insisting that Google defunded the Federalist because of its ideological viewpoints.

The truth is that Google's AdSense (its third-party ad platform) content moderation just sucks. In those earlier posts about The Federalist's situation, we mentioned that tons of websites deal with those "policy violation" notices from Google all the time. Two weeks ago, it went into overdrive for us: we started receiving policy violation notices at least once a day, and frequently multiple times per day. Every time, the message was the same, telling us we had violated their policies (they don't say which ones) and we had to log in to our "AdSense Policy Center" to find out what the problem was. Every day for the ensuing week and a half (until we pulled the ads down), we would get more of these notices, and every time we'd log in to the Policy Center, we'd get an ever rotating list of "violations." But there was never much info to explain what the violation was. Sometimes it was "URL not found" (which seems to say more about AdSense's shit crawler than us). Sometimes it was "dangerous and derogatory content." Sometimes it was "shocking content."

But that would be about it. One difference, however, was that in the past Google would say that we didn't need to fix those flagged URLs and that they would just stop showing ads on those pages. Which is fine. They don't want their ads appearing there, no problem. But, many of these new "policy violations" said they were "must fix" issues. But what that "fix" sould be was never explained. Incredibly, this included a non-existent URL (a malformed URL that would just take you to the front page of Techdirt). That was deemed "must fix." Also, somewhat amusingly, the tag page for Google was deemed "dangerous or derogatory" and "must fix":

Same with the tag page for "content moderation." I only wish I were joking:

Again, what you see there was basically all of the information given to us. How do we "fix" that? Who the fuck knows? Again, I do not think that this is Google targeting us for our views (even when we have been critical of Google or Google's content moderation practices). It just seems to be that content moderation is impossible to do well, and Google is a prime example.

Incredibly, this list of problematic URLs would just keep changing. Some would drop off the list with no explanation (even the "must fix" ones). Some new ones would be added. Some would switch between "must fix" and "don't need to fix." No explanation. No record of the "fixes." As an example, on Friday July 31st, I logged in and saw 25 URLs deemed to be policy violations. On Saturday morning I logged in and it was down to 18. No reason. Sunday morning it was at 22. But Sunday evening it was 27.

I tried to reach out to people at AdSense to figure out what the hell we should do and did not get back anything useful.

Three other things happened around this time as well. First, on the same day we started receiving these daily (or multiple times daily) policy violation emails, Google also started claiming that our daily emails (which are just snapshots of the blog itself) were phishing attempts, and automatically deleting them from any G Suite user's email account:

For users of Gmail (not G Suite) it just moved our newsletters to spam, still claiming they were phishing attempts:

Again, the emails don't ask users to do anything or to log in to anything. They're not phishing. They're just an email version of the day's blog posts. We didn't see how these two things (the AdSense violations and the accusations of "phishing") could possibly be connected, so it might just be a coincidence that they started the exact same day -- but, again, who knows?

The next thing that happened was that the company we work with to manage the ad flow on our website (and to bring in other sources, beyond Google ads) told us that Google had reached out to them (not us) to say that because of all of the ongoing unfixed "policy" violations, we would be kicked out of AdSense by the end of August. Also, Google told them that we were engaging in "clickspam" by hiding our ads to make them look like regular content, and that needed to be fixed immediately. The problem is -- we don't do that and have never done that. Our ads were always in the right hand column and clearly called out as ads. Indeed, we pay attention to what other sites do, and we are way, way, way, way more careful than basically every other website on the planet when it comes to not shoving our ads where they might be mistaken as organic content.

Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on. And, to be honest, that's the last straw for us. We would try to work with Google to understand why our content is so problematic for it, but when Google's products start harming our users and causing a nuisance for them, that's when they've got to go.

Given all this, we just decided that we're pulling the ads off the site entirely for the time being -- at least until we can figure out a better situation. This (obviously) represents a revenue hit for us, but the situation had become impossible to deal with. I was wasting so much time the past few weeks trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do, as opposed to doing the work I needed to be doing. So, that's it for now. We're looking at other providers out there, but so far, so many of the ones we talk to appear to be sketchy, and we're not doing that either. If anyone knows of any non-sketchy, non-awful advertising partners, please let us know. Or, if you happen to have some excess money and want to just sponsor stuff so we don't even have to worry about regular ads, let us know. Assuming most of you are not in that position, we do have a page of various ways individuals can support us. We know that times are tough for many, many people right now, but if you happen to be doing okay, and can help us replace at least a little of what money we made from ads, that would be greatly appreciated.

Filed Under: ads, adsense, business models, content moderation, dangerous, dangerous and derogatory, techdirt
Companies: google, techdirt

Masks & More: Techdirt Logo Gear Is Now On Threadless

from the wear-your-techdirt dept

Get your Techdirt Logo Gear in our store on Threadless »

Lots of people have been buying our newly-launched face masks on Threadless, so we figured it was time to make the classic Techdirt logo gear available on the platform. You can now get face masks in both our logo gear styles — the standard logo and the big logo — with two different kinds of masks available, as well as youth sizes.

Plus, as with all our designs, there's a wide variety of gear available: t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and other apparel — plus cool accessories and home items including buttons, phone cases (for many iPhone and Galaxy models), mugs, tote bags, and stylish notebooks and journals. And you can still get all our other popular designs:

As always, all the profits from gear sales help us keep Techdirt going and continue our reporting through this challenging pandemic situation and beyond. You can also check out our list of all the different ways to support Techdirt with a bunch of options for readers to help us out and get something cool or useful in return!

Filed Under: gear, merchandise, nerd harder, ok landlord, techdirt, techdirt gear

In Case You Missed It: The Return Of Nerd Harder Gear, Plus New Face Masks!

from the mask-harder dept

Nerd Harder gear is back, and face masks are available
in the Techdirt Gear store on Threadless »

At the end of last month, we fulfilled two of the most popular requests (one long-standing, and one brand new) for Techdirt gear: we brought back the Nerd Harder line of gear, and introduced a series of face masks featuring some of our most popular designs!

You can find all these offerings in our artist store on Threadless, with multiple products available. Face masks come in two styles (standard and premium) as well as youth sizes, and there are t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and other apparel — plus a variety of cool accessories and home items including buttons, phone cases (for many iPhone and Galaxy models), mugs, tote bags, and stylish notebooks and journals.

All the profits from gear sales help us keep Techdirt going and continue our reporting through this challenging pandemic situation and beyond, and we're hugely appreciative of all the support. You can also check out our list of all the different ways to support Techdirt with a wide variety of options for readers to help us out and get something cool or useful in return!

Filed Under: gear, merchandise, nerd harder, ok landlord, techdirt, techdirt gear