The new year is approaching fast, and that means it’s time for our annual look at the highest-voted comments of the year on Techdirt (as usual, including the top three in each category). This year’s list is something of an inverse of last year’s: while 2023 had only a couple winning comments from anonymous commenters, 2024 was dominated by them; and while 2023 had no overlap at all between the separate Insightful and Funny leaderboards and the third leaderboard for both types of votes combined, this year has only one outlier “combined votes” winner that didn’t make the list for either category individually. So without further preamble, let’s dig in!
(If you’re interested in this week’s winners, here’s first and second place for Insightful and first and second place for Funny.)
The Most Insightful Comments Of 2024
For our first place winner on the insightful side, we head back to June and one of our many posts about Elon Musk suing his critics while reporters continue to expose his monetization of hate on ExTwitter. A thread sprouted up around a silly attempt to equate White Supremacist movements with Black History celebrations, and this anonymous reply received the most insightful votes of the year:
Black people: celebrating overcoming slavery and other historical injustices
Nazis: celebrating having white skin, and committing historical injustices
Idiots on the internet: “these are the same thing”
For the second place winner, we head back a couple more months to April and our post about Jim Jordan demanding companies explain why they won’t advertise on Truth Social. One anonymous comment racked up the votes by summarizing the hypocrisy:
Far right: we support free speech and free markets!
Businesses: We’ve decided it’s not in our best interest to advertise on this far-right website.
Far right: Advertise there or else!
In third place, it’s yet another anonymous winner (though under the name Amazing Rando this time), commenting on our post about how non-profits reporting on terrible ExTwitter content were unperturbed by the lawsuits against them. The winning comment is a reply to another comment about the complexity of dealing with the rules around foreign assets and sanctions:
That’s why it’s so important to have a team, maybe call them Trust & Safety or Compliance to keep you out of this sort of trouble!
And with that, we move on to…
The Funniest Comments Of 2024
The anonymous streak continues as we kick off the Funny leaderboard with our first place comment of the year, which is also on our April post about Jim Jordan and Truth Social. This time, it’s the first comment on the post, and just a little joke:
The advertisers should just hide in a locker room. Gym won’t see anything.
For second place, we head back to June, and a post about how Trump threatening ProPublica further demonstrates the need for anti-SLAPP laws. A comment about how Trump in fact demonstrates the need for all kinds of rules garnered this winning anonymous reply:
Trump’s next job…
Interviewer: Are there any accomplishments from your last job that you’re particularly proud of?
Candidate: I’m responsible for ten new rules in their employee handbook.
Interviewer: That’s great! You wrote them?
Candiate: That’s not what I said.
And finally, in third place, we have our first appearance of a non-anonymous winner this year. It’s again on our post about Musk suing his critics, where Thad replied directly to some narrowly selected language about how “either Musk is learning”:
Yeah, it’s not that one.
And that’s a wrap on the funny side! But, before we go, let’s have a look at…
The Outlier: Insightful & Funny Votes Combined
As noted earlier, this year there’s just one comment on the leaderboard for both types of votes combined that didn’t already appear on the individual lists. The first and third place winners for combined votes were also the second and first place winners, respectively, for just Funny votes — but in second place for combined votes, we have one more comment. It’s also the only other non-anonymous winner of the year, coming from Toom1275 on our March post about Missouri’s transphobic speech laws:
Teaching kids the reality that trans people exist and are normal is no more grooming them than teaching kids that frogs exist is grooming them to become amphibians.
And with that, we’re all done for 2024. Thanks as always to all the commenters — both regular and occasional, both recognizable and anonymous — who keep our community insightful, funny, and full of great content for these posts. I look forward to seeing what you have to say in 2025!
