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It’s that time again! Instead of our usual look at the top comments of the week, it’s time to celebrate the most highly voted comments of the year at Techdirt. As usual we’ll be looking at the top three winners in the Insightful and Funny categories, as well as some outliers that rose to the leaderboard of votes in both categories combined. Normally I also link to the weekly winners for those who...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020-2021, we published a series of posts on Trump’s Presidential Commission On Law Enforcement, starting with a look at its tone that everyone but cops are to blame for the terrible state of policing, followed by its repeated calls for anti-encryption legislation, and its conclusion that doing the same things that haven’t worked for years will reduce violent crime....
At the beginning of the month, we kicked off a fundraising drive to help sustain the independent, uncompromising coverage that we always try to offer at Techdirt. We also decided to try a new experiment that we hope to turn into an annual tradition: offering up a limited edition commemorative coin for our biggest supporters. Since 2026 also happens to be the 30th birthday of Section 230, a law we...
As you hopefully know by now, we are once again hosting our annual game jam celebrating the works that enter the public domain in 2026, a.k.a. today! This year, that means we enter a new decade, as works originally published in 1930 finally exit copyright protection and become free to remix, repurpose, and build on. Gaming Like It’s 1930! begins today and runs until the end of the month, and we’...
Look, I get it. The world is a mess. Important institutions are crumbling. It feels like both the tech and political worlds are collaborating to squeeze all remaining humanity out of all of us. Cynicism is ascendant. Nihilism is the new black.
And yet: I remain optimistic.
Not the naive, everything-will-work-out-fine kind of optimism. The kind grounded in seeing what’s actually happening beneath...
I certainly don’t expect the wider Techdirt readership to care all that much about NFL football or, more specifically a single local team like the Chicago Bears. So, to that end, here’s a hopefully educational preamble to this post that will provide you with the context you need. If you were to make a list of the single biggest rivalries in the NFL, that list should begin with the rivalry between...
Before she was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda and safe space, Bari Weiss tried her best to create a fake propaganda-fueled college in Austin.
If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “...
Over the summer, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upended decades of traditional First Amendment standards to say that Texas could put in place an age verification law if that law was intended to keep kids away from porn. As we argued at the time, the ruling had all sorts of problems, but even leaving those aside, it was still pretty clearly limited solely to situations involving age...
Mastering a new language has never been this fun or effective. Whether you are learning for travel, school, career, or family, Duolingo is the ultimate tool to get you there. Super Duolingo gives you uninterrupted, ad-free learning, unlimited hearts to keep practicing without limits, tailored mistake reviews, access to the toughest legendary levels, and offline lessons you can take anywhere. This...
America continues to be made great again. Or so says the collective of fascist buffoons currently holding federal positions of power.
The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about bringing the “rule of law” back to America — something that supposedly went missing during Biden’s term. The alleged lawlessness covers everything from rational immigration policies to whatever the fuck the...