Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of 2025 At Techdirt

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 are interested, but since I’m writing this a bit early and commenting has been very slow this week, we’re going to skip that and get right into the main event.

The Most Insightful Comments Of 2025

For our most insightful comment of the year, we head all the way back to January when Trump’s Department of Education rolled back its anti-book-ban guidance and invited more censorship in schools. An anonymous comment rose to the top by offering up the message students should be taking from this:

Remember, kids. If a government is trying this hard to ban books, you should damn well be interested in finding out what those books actually say!

For second place, we move forward a bit to March, when we published our tentpole post explaining why the horrifying state of US politics means Techdirt is now a democracy blog. One commenter asked for recommendations of other sites doing similar work, and Thad racked up the votes by providing some advice:

Wired has been pretty much head of the pack at covering Musk’s government takeover.

ProPublica might be the best national news outlet in the country at this point. It’s independent and donation-supported.

404 Media is owned and operated by journalists who were laid off from Motherboard; they’re doing good work in the same tech-oriented vein as Techdirt and Wired.

You may also want to look into supporting your local paper and your local PBS affiliate. And maybe your local NPR station? I kinda got burned out on mine by one too many “let’s go to a diner and talk to Trump supporters to see if they’re still Trump supporters” Cletus safari, but they’re still better than the for-profit news media.

Finally, for third place, we jump back to January again, and the story of a Milwaukee meteorologist who was fired the day after criticizing Elon Musk’s on-stage Nazi salute. Maura had some personal thoughts on the incident and the excuses people were making for the world’s richest far-right troll:

I hate that Elon Musk’s fans are using his autism diagnosis to excuse his behavior. I’m on the autism spectrum. Like Musk, I have autism 1 (formerly Asperger’s syndrome), and like Musk, I struggle with the non verbal, implicit communication primates use to learn complex social behavior. My issues are thus: autism or not, Musk is keenly aware of the political climate. There is no way he did not or could not understand that such a gesture would be extremely controversial. Second, plenty of smart autistic people have self stimulatory behaviors that can involve movements and gestures ( I point at things with my whole hand with my ring finger bent), and if Musk’s stimming truly looks like Nazi salutes (