Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous reply in a discussion about how to deal with trolls:

This kind of condescension mixed with vague references that assume everyone else is an idiot is completely useless because not only are you expecting people to read your mind, but you’re assuming your conclusion is flawless and won’t be thought of and dismissed by others. Just come out and say it directly or you’re just as bad as a troll.

In second place, it’s TKnarr responding to some understandable concern about KOSA support indicating the Senate has been “bought”:

They don’t need to be bought, “Think of the children!” is enough of a rallying cry among the uninformed that very few Senators can afford to oppose it. I’m just surprised that 13 Senators went as far as declining to vote in favor of it.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about Elon Musk’s unhelpful and exaggerated “engagement” metrics for Twitter:

Not only is it a meaningless metric…

…but even if we qualify it in some way to make it something worth measuring — for example, just to pick one of many available options “time logged into the site”, it still means nothing.

“Leaving the site open in a browser tab” or “leaving the app running on a device” isn’t engagement – it has little to do with people actually doing things actively.

And beyond that: Twitter is increasingly overrun by bots – porn bots, crypto bots, spam bots, Nazi bots, incel bots, whatever bots. Of course it is: Elon WANTS it to be, because bots inflate the user count and make Twitter look much more popular than it really is.

Here’s a data point for you: last night, I watched one of my colleagues log into their (small, little used) Twitter account. They’d picked up 282 new followers, which is impressive given that they only had about 30 previously. And all of those 282, ALL OF THEM, were porn bots, and all of them had followed 3,000 to 5,000 accounts. This is significant because Twitter rate-limits follows: you can only follow so many other accounts per unit time. Which means that all 282 of those porn bot accounts had to be cumulatively logged in long enough to follow thousands of accounts – each.

The point being that if “time logged in” is used to calculate user-seconds, then an awful lot of that is being racked up by bots, not by people. I’m sure that Elon knows this, but like the insecure miserable failure that he is, he’s lying about it in order to mislead investors, analysts, regulators, and everyone else.

Next, it’s a comment from Jess (in fact from Jess Miers, the author of the post) about what people can do to help protect the internet from terrible laws:

Great Q. Put pressure on lawmakers (especially your representatives) the moment these bills are introduced. Many lawmakers I engaged with felt that silence meant that their constituents liked their bills. Controversial bills struggle to get out of committees.

Push back on “techlash” in the media. Some is warranted, a lot of it is just easy clickbait. The more public techlash, the less inclined the companies are to fight. The public tech narrative needs a serious facelift.

Lastly, put pressure on the tech companies themselves, especially those that opt for silence in the face of bad policy. Advocacy and willingness to fight is a strong indicator of a tech company that cares about more than just their bottom line.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is That One Guy with a comment about Fox News and its extremely pathetic attempt to link the Trump shooter to video games:

‘Games and social media it is then!’

‘We can’t blame his mental state because that might get people wondering why we don’t have a good system in place to deal with mental issues in this country…’

‘We can’t blame the guns because guns, the easy access to them, and the fetishisation of them is never to blame…’

‘We can’t blame his political party because whoops, he’s one of ours, a member of the ‘Be Afraid And Be Prepared to Fight To Defend Yourself’ party…’

‘We can’t blame the idea that any psychopath that wants to be turned into an instant celebrity knows all they need to do is kill/try to kill someone and they’ll be plastered on the news for weeks on end with people talking about them since that’s exactly what we’re doing right now…’

‘Ooh, I’ve got it!’

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about Twitter “engagement”:

Elon’s ExTwit metrics are about as reliable as Trump’s crowd size metrics.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more anonymous quip about those metrics:

It’s underwear gnomes’ logic!

1) invent a new metric
2) declare “by this new metric, we’re doing better than ever!”
3) ?????
4) profit!

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about Congress pushing a bill that would let private companies control access to the law:

Is it illegal if it’s illegal to know it’s illegal?

That’s all for this week, folks!