Funniest/Most Insightful Comments of the Week on Techdirt - News Block

from the talk about the city department

This week our first place winner for the insightful side is cdevon2 with a response to the notion that it’s somewhat ironic that people who wanted to leave Twitter complain about not being able to read tweets:

It assumes that the same people who are actively leaving the site are the ones complaining and not, for example, people who aren’t as connected as you are and who might be looking for tweets from their local emergency services.

Second, this is an anonymous comment on Twitter’s threat to sue Meta, which invoked the former employees’ “continuing obligations to Twitter”:

The ones that Twitter hasn’t paid? Those employees?

For Editor’s Choice on the insightful side, we start with an anonymous comment added to our post about Musk speeding up the “enshittification curve”:

I think this story is incomplete without mentioning what else Elon spent his time doing while it was all going on, particularly since TechDirt also discusses policy issues. Specifically, he decided to push Islamophobia and replacement theory, blame white women, and endorse the idea of second-class citizenship.
https://i.imgur.com/mt96SHL.png
At this point I’m not even sure it’s an enshittification learning curve, I think there’s a very good chance it’s a deliberate destruction curve. Hanlon’s razor is wearing out pretty badly.

Below, PaulT responds to the claim that Gmail has monopolized email by destroying people’s ability to self-host email:

I mean… that ability is still there, literally, there’s nothing stopping you from setting up your own server or using a third party that doesn’t do those things.

There are arguments as to why people pass management to Google et al. and why it’s better for them to take care of the issues involved, but nothing they’ve done has removed the ability for someone to self-host.

On the fun side, our two winners come in response to Elon’s Twitter enshittification. First of all, it’s Cat_Daddy with a summarized dialogue:

Techdirt: “Tweet limits! You actively sabotaged your own website by limiting the number of views on tweets! It’s so dumb.
Musksimps: “Oh, he’s so silly, he’s brilliant!”
Techdirt: “Nope! It’s just dumb.

Second, it is an anonymous coinage:

There is enshitification, and then there is elonification.

Twitter isn’t JUST being enshitified, it’s being elonified.

For the editor’s choice on the fun side, we start with one more anonymous comment on that post, this time on the new CEO of Twitter’s tweet about what happens “when you’re on a big mission like Twitter” :/