Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of 2016 At Techdirt
Furnished content.
Happy new year, everyone! It's time for our annual look back at the highest-scoring comments of the year, and this time around we've got first and second place winners in both categories then a special third-place entry. (If you want to know this week's winners, here's first and second place for insightful, and first and second place for funny.)Most Insightful Comments Of The YearFor 2016's first place winner on the insightful side, we only have to head back to September, when terrorism scares in New York and New Jersey prompted Hillary Clinton to call on Silicon Valley, once again, to nerd harder and find a way to stop radicalization. Norahc racked up the votes with a smart rebuke:
Nerd Harder?Next, we go all the way back to February, where we have the only one of this year's winners who appeared on last year's list. That One Guy took first place for insightful last year, and this year he made it to second place with a response to the latest (at the time) claim that people don't need faster broadband:
Perhaps if in her role as Secretary of State, she had "diplomat harder" we might have found a way to prevent the radicalization of people. Then again, that would entail people like her (including the other candidate) having to do real work instead of demanding other people work harder.
"No one needs that much, no one will ever use it!"Funniest Comments Of The YearAt this point, there's a well-established tradition among commenters here at Techdirt that most people reading this post are probably familiar with: whenever we are critical of Google (which is not too infrequent an occurrence) at least one commenter must sarcastically chime in to accuse us of being Google "shills", in order to highlight the absurdity of the small community of trollish commenters who make the same claim sincerely. It happened many times this year, and one such time — after we expressed some serious irritation at a major fail by Google's link shortening service in September — gave JD the chance to win funniest comment of 2016:
Saying that no one needs a 25 Mbps connection because a single user/service won't use it completely is rather like saying that there's no point in building multi-lane roads or highways because a single car will never be able to take up more than one lane.
Just more proof ...Many people have bemoaned the celebrity deaths of 2016, to the point that it's getting pretty tiresome — but there's no denying that the loss of David Bowie back in January hit plenty of people pretty hard. Amidst the calls for radio stations to do all-day tributes and the like, we took a moment to point out that US copyright law generally makes such a thing impossible. Our second place comment on the funny side comes from an anonymous commenter who, in thinking even further about the bigger picture, beautifully highlighted the extent to which so much of copyright law just makes no sense:
Clearly this is just more proof that Mike Masnick is a Google shill.
The saddest thing is that Bowie only has an incentive to write new music for 70 more years.The Special Third Place But Kind Of First Place Winner!In last year's annual roundup, we highlighted the top three comments on each side plus an extra comment that had only ranked on the combined votes scale but not in either category. This year, something a little different happened: one comment came in at third place on both the funny and insightful sides, and in doing so also came in first place on the combined votes leaderboard. It came way back in January, when cryptographer David Chaum announced worrying plans to help build a backdoored encryption system to please agencies like the FBI, which would supposedly be kept safe by being controlled by nine server administrators around the world. A-Non Mouse spotted a tiny detail that was equal parts funny and insightful:
Who holds the keys?Amusingly, another commenter immediately replied to ask: "Is this the best comment of 2016?" Well, according to the combined votes for funny and insightful, it was indeed.That's all for this
"...nine server administrators..."
Let me put that another way:
Nine
Server
Administrators
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