Happy (almost) new year, Techdirt readers! As always, it’s time to take take a break from the regular weekly post and take a look at the comments that got the most votes from our community this year in the insightful and funny categories, plus a special look at the comments that got the most combined votes across both. If you want to see the winners for this week, here’s first and second place for insightful, and first and second place for funny. Now, on to the big winners!
The Most Insightful Comments Of 2023
Given all the news he created, and all the conversation it generated, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that comments about Elon Musk dominated the leaderboards this year. All the way back in May, we learned many things about Musk’s, er, unique management style when six former Twitter employees filed a lawsuit full of juicy details, including more information about the previously-revealed fact that Musk didn’t want to pay rent for the Twitter headquarters. They employees’ stories painted quite a picture, leading TKnarr to react with what was voted the most insightful comment of 2023:
Written record
This sounds like prime examples of a rule I’ve had for decades: if your bosses don’t want a written record of something, you absolutely need a written record of it.
Things aren’t wall-to-wall Musk in the winners, but to be honest it’s pretty damn close: there are only two comments unrelated to Musk out of the nine featured in this post, and one of them is our second place winner on the insightful side. Instead, it’s about another CEO who briefly stole the spotlight with terrible business decisions. Namely Reddit’s Steve Huffman, who back in June went to war with the site’s volunteer mods and basically the whole Reddit community. Radix offered a summary of some of his comments that racked up the votes to become the second most insightful comment of 2023:
“We don’t do things for free, so all the unpaid mods should get back to work” is quite the statement.
But of course nobody could upstage Elon Musk for long, and in October we were talking about his harebrained plan to turn ExTwitter into a financial services app that would ostensibly take over just about everything everyone does related to money. That led to the first of two anonymous comments to make this year’s list, with some prognostication that was voted the third most insightful comment of 2023:
Given how well that Elon complies with consent decrees, I suspect his compliance with banking regulation will give his financial service ambition a lifetime of about 5 minutes.
And with that, we move on to…
The Funniest Comments of 2023
On the funny side of things, we kick things off with our second and last diversion from the exploits of Elon. As you may recall, back in July the New York Times wrote up a great profile of Mike Masnick, and we featured a brief post calling attention to it. DJ suggested that we should have taken a different approach in what was voted the funniest comment of 2023:
Streisand?
What you should have done is post a very angry article here decrying it as a hit piece asking people to ignore it and see if you could have Streisand effect it to an even bigger audience.
Next, we move on to the earliest of all the comments so far, from all the way back in February when Elon Musk announced new and onerous pricing for the Twitter API that instantly gutted many useful things about the site. Keroberos stepped in with the first comment on the post, a heavy helping of general sarcasm (at a time when a lot more people still believed Musk must have some brilliant trick up his sleeve) that was voted the second funniest comment of 2023:
Hey now, if driving away all the advertisers, users, and third party developers — and completely destroying Twitter in the process gets rid of those pesky bots, it’s a small price to pay. Our boy Elon (being such a big brain, smarty-pants, capable of playing 12D chess), must surely be working from home grand multi-step plan that will become crystal clear to us normies at some point. Right?
Last but not least on the funny side, we have the return of Stephen T. Stone, who you may recall fully swept the insightful category and won all three spots in last year’s rankings. This time it’s the most recent comment in the list so far, coming just a few weeks ago when we wrote about Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters and his reinstatement of Alex Jones, and alas it’s not an original work but a pass-along joke that was apt enough to be voted the third funniest comment of 2023:
Not my joke: Elon may have broken Twitter, but we can take some comfort in the fact that Twitter broke Elon.
But we’re not done yet, because first it’s time for…
The Top Comments Of 2023 For Insightful & Funny Votes Combined
More often than not, there’s some overlap between the leaderboards for funny and insightful votes individually, and the leaderboard for votes in both categories combined — but this isn’t one of those years. So we’ve got three more comments to feature (and yes, they’re all about Elon Musk). In first place for combined votes (with more votes on the insightful side, but plenty on both) it’s our second anonymous winner of the year, responding to Musk’s realization in August that credit cards weren’t enough for verification, and his subsequent plans to make verified users start uploading government identification:
I have complete confidence that the man notorious for not abiding by contractual agreements will absolutely abide by the stated privacy policy and keep my information secure.
In second place, it’s our only instance of two winners coming from the same post, with another entry from the Twitter API pricing announcement back in February (indeed it came in just three minutes after the comment that one second place for funny). This time, it’s That One Guy racking up lots of votes in both categories (but more on the funny side) for some solid speculation on what would follow:
Annnd they’re gone
Musk: Let all bask in my brilliance, now that app developers have to pay to increase the value of my platform our money troubles are over!
Five seconds later
What do you mean they’re ditching Twitter and shifting focus to other platforms rather than pay extortionate rates for the privilege of enriching me, who could have ever seen that coming?!
And last but not least, we’ve got our third place winner for combined votes (with again just a little more on the funny side), coming in at the end of November when Musk really outdid himself by going on stage and telling fleeing advertisers to go fuck themselves. He then went on to insist that “Earth” would judge which of them was in the right, leading Thad to accept the invitation:
Earth? Hey, I’m from Earth!
And my judgement is…it’s not Bob Iger’s fault that Elon Musk is a fucking nazi.
And with that, we close the books on 2023. Once again, thanks to all the commenters who keep generating great content for the weekly posts and these yearly roundups. I look forward to the continuing conversation in 2024!
