Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing all about Section 230, in which they didn’t even attempt to find a witness pointing out its benefits. Among the many organizations that could have provided that vital perspective is the Wikimedia Foundation (as seen in three excellent posts on Medium), and this week we’re joined by Rebecca MacKinnon, Wikimedia’s VP of Global Advocacy and long-time open internet defender, to talk about why the hearing was bad and Section 230 is very, very important.
The difference is that the things Elon does is actually happeni9ng, while the things you feel we -should- be concerned about are just 4chan bigot grievance madlibs that have passed through the far right think tank filter. It’s as real as litter trays in school for furries, but boy does it sound good as a thing that is totally happening that people should be mad at… Except whenever people ask for proof, there is none, if there were it would be EVERYWHERE, not just confined to far right blogs, youtube ranters and assholes in comment sections, shithead TERFs at the NYT would be eagerly and thoughtlessly signalboosting it.
There is nothing, you have nothing but insincere shrieks of ‘think of the children’, the same kids you will eagerly see married off to people three times their ages the second they hit puberty should your theocratic dreams ever come to pass. If it ever did, you’d still be a mad incel, angry at some other group because nobody wants to be with a bitter husk, you’d be about as likely to get fucked in that universe as you are to have Elon love you back in this one.
In second place, it’s Strawb responding to the assertion that a content removal demand by a Brazilian Supreme Court justice isn’t a slippery slope:
Yes, it is. Just because you like the outcome doesn’t mean that attempted government censorship is suddenly a good thing.
At this point, I can’t tell if Musk is just sort of a black hole of stupidity, attracting other idiots, or if his own stupidity slowly infects the ones that orbit him.
The issue with SOPA wasn’t that it ensured that copyright issues on platforms have to be blocked, it insured that entire websites have to be blocked. That’s like saying YouTube should be blocked because of its copyright infringements. It was a case of copyright maximalism then and it’s a case of copyright maximalism now. And it’s extremely disappointing that Hollywood has learned nothing.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about AI-powered fake copyright trolling threat letters that were actually just an SEO scam:
You people think it’s funny!
But here’s a prime example of AI taking jobs from poor, honest, hardworking, SEO scammers like Jhon Smith!
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!
These are people who are either in office or running for it, stop assuming that the reason they keep getting 230 wrong is because they ‘don’t understand’ what might be the simplest law on the books based upon the most basic concept of ‘if you didn’t say if you’re not liable for it’.
There is no chance that they haven’t been corrected repeatedly by actual experts about what the law actually says when they get it wrong and even less chance that they don’t have the ability to get experts on the line within the day if they so desired so if they get something wrong? Make an ‘oopsie’ about what the law says? A tiny little mistake about how the law works?
That’s intentional
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Mamba about the notion that every argument should be debated rather than dismissed or suppressed. It’s a great comment despite a lot of typos:
That is so much bullshit.
Brandolini’s law dictates that you’d have to find a substantially larger number of people to ‘debate’ antivaxers, because one side isn’t ‘arguing’ in good faith. They are willing to outright lie, and when that’s the. And there’s absolutely no reason to engage with them. One doesn’t argue with a fraudster calling on the phone about a Nigerian prince that needs your help. You hang up on them.
Firing others to debate you isn’t a right, but free association is.
Those laws exist because they are exceptions to the default. The reason the laws needed to be passed was because under 1A analysis, corporations could use their right of free association to fire an employee for whistleblowing. So we had to pass laws to advance compelling public interests that were in conflict with 1A. The laws exhibit the default standard for balancing employer/employee 1A conflicts that should apply.
You’ve chosen to assert an exception must exist, but your assertion is just as factually vacuous as the claim that a government can suppress speech because free speech exceptions exist. You are trying to move the point of proving to Mike, and off of Musk, Carano, Et. al.. But they are claiming an exception to 1A ROA exists in conflict with the standard evidenced in law.
Yes, exceptions to the 1A right of association exist. Nothing you have introduced indicates an exception exists in this case. Nor a compelling public policy reason courts should force the AADL to retain Neo-Nazi Skinheads, or the NAACP from retaining an active Klansman.
Over on the funny side, both our winners come in response to the story about Jim Jordan. In first place, it’s a quick anonymous quip:
The advertisers should just hide in a locker room. Gym won’t see anything.
A small tabletop roleplaying game is an excellent project to undertake for a jam like this, as putting one together requires nothing more than a clear theme and some written rules, but that doesn’t mean making a good one is easy. To stand out, such a game needs to shine in at least one way whether that’s highly engaging written content for the setting and characters, or rich and interesting rules that suggest gameplay depth, or — as is often the most impressive, and as is the case with Lucienne Impala’s Letters to Cthulhu — a creative and clever core mechanic that brings the entire thing into focus.
The game, which is based on the H. P. Lovecraft story of the same name and the broader mythos of his works, puts players in the shoes (or robes) of Cthulhu cultists trying to communicate with their dark god. There’s a thematic core that’s essential to this kind of Lovecraftian story and setting: a roiling mixture of ambition, avarice, fear, power, awe, and madness. Lovecraft explored these themes through dozens of stories, while the game takes them on in a mere ten pages of rules.
The game is simple: one player takes on the role of Cthulhu, and will serve as the judge of the outcome, while the rest are tasked with composing the letter that will be judged. The group’s goal is to bring Cthulhu forth into the world, but each cultist is also randomly assigned a secret desire of their own, and each contributes just one sentence to the letter as it’s passed around the group. And there’s a twist: each cultist also has a specific way in which they can alter the previous sentence.
How they use this power (and if they use it at all) is up to them — will they try to manipulate the letter to ensure their own desires are fulfilled, or try to stymie the greed of others and keep the group on track towards its shared goal? Perhaps both, or neither. It becomes a monstrously corrupted game of telephone, where every link in the chain matters. The balance of desires in the final letter will determine the outcome, as the player representing Cthulhu uses a few simple rules (and a lot of freeform narrative creativity) to decide the fate that befalls the group and each individual.
The game is designed to move relatively quickly so it can be played more than once, each time with different players taking on the role of Cthulhu and different desires for all the cultists, and it’s best played with a larger group of 6-8 people. The tense, paranoid, conniving dynamic the game creates is subtle and specific to its source material, and is successfully established by just a few pages of rules that anyone can learn in moments. That kind of design elegance is always worth of note, and earns Letters to Cthulhu the title of Best Analog Game.
And that’s a wrap on this year’s winner spotlights. A huge thanks to everyone who submitted a game this year! We’ll be back next January, as always, with Gaming Like It’s 1929 —and whether you’ve entered the jam before or are thinking about doing it for the first time, it’s never too early to start exploring the many great works that will be entering the public domain in 2025.
But if we inject poison into the atmosphere merely as a side effect of making money, that’s still totally cool, right?
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments from the same anonymous commenter, making the same point in response to another commenter whose response to our story about Elon Musk’s latest content moderation escapade was “his site, his rules”. That is of course true, but not the point, as the first comment explained:
Yep. And his rules for his site speak volumes about who he is.
Dude. Don’t. Last time we asked for evidence, they showed us Hunter Biden’s dick.
In second place, the anonymous streak continues with a comment on our post about the judge slamming Elon Musk for his vexatious SLAPP suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, invoking the record of a certain other commenter:
I’ll just leave this here:
Matthew M Bennett August 1, 2023 at 12:32 pm
You don’t understand the law
If CCDH made substantive claims that were not true, especially if it knew them to be untrue or was doing so with a purpose to hurt Twitter (but neither is required) of course that could be the subject of a defamation claim.
But poor research methodology does not violate the law
Strawman detected. Poor research methodology is not “against the law”, but it doesn’t fucking protect you from a defamation suit, either.
So why is this “clearly” a SLAPP lawsuit? Cuz you really don’t like Musk?
Hey, Twitter lost money over the last 5 years it was public. Not defamation, because truth is an absolute defense.
Do you people think Bratty Matty understands the law better than Mike as he claims?
Well, you can judge for yourself by reading the whole thread the quote above was taken from.
Most of the submissions we receive in these jams come from solo designers, but this game is a powerful demonstration of what a small team can accomplish. By splitting up the tasks (Javi Muhrer did the programming, Chris Muhrer designed the levels, and McCoy Khamphouy created the art) were able to achieve something fairly rare in the jam: a complete video game, built from the ground up with all original elements. Based on the early American picture book of the same name by Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats is a classic puzzle platformer that offers everything you’d expect from such a title: a clever core mechanic that’s easy to understand and seems simple at first, but which must be used in increasingly creative and thoughtful ways through a series of increasingly challenging levels.
As the player, you control the character described in the original book only as “the very old man”, who is plagued and/or blessed by avid followers in the form of unlimited cats. With a button press, you can spawn more and more cats to trail behind you and copying your actions, and though you can’t control them directly, with some clever movement you can maneuver them to press buttons and help you reach the end of each level. Your score can be increased by using as few cats as possible, adding a great “find the true solution” challenge that gives puzzle games like this more replay value.
After a couple of levels, it quickly becomes clear how this mechanic can easily serve as the engine for all kinds of puzzles. That alone would be a satisfying prototype and more than enough for a game jam entry — the kind of thing a solo developer could pull off too. But this small team didn’t stop there. By having a dedicated level designer, they were able to include a pretty full slate of levels (I’m not quite sure of the final count, as I didn’t get to the end!) that explore several aspects of the core mechanic. Level design is so critical to puzzle platformers like this, so it really pays off. And while all this could have been presented with placeholder graphics or something generic, instead we get handcrafted original sprites and backgrounds, and even a custom title treatment for the game.
Overall, this is probably the most ambitious video game project we’ve had as an entry in these game jams, and it absolutely lives up to that ambition. That’s a testament not just to the skill and talent of the individual designers, but also to their ability to organize and coordinate a development project like this while each focuses on their area of expertise. It’s no surprise that Millions of Cats is this year’s Best Digital Game.
Last year in September, we released a cross-post episode of Mike’s appearance on the DWeb Decoded podcast with Danny O’Brien. If you listened to that episode, you know that Mike and Danny go way back, and Danny played an important role in the founding of Techdirt. This week, we’ve got the inverse counterpart to that episode, with Danny joining Mike here on the Techdirt podcast for a discussion about decentralization and “cognitive liberty” (and a bunch of other topics).
Not in general!
We do plan to run a few promos on episodes of the Techdirt podcast, and maybe put some teaser excerpts from this podcast into the Techdirt feed between regular episodes - plus at some point Ben will be joining Mike on the Techdirt Podcast to talk about the launch of Ctrl-Alt-Speech.
But other than that additional stuff, the Techdirt Podcast will be proceeding as normal!
I'm not personally the type to download and listen to an album of retro chiptunes themselves, but there are indeed a lot of bangers in the world of nintendo music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASvFH3w1Ik
You haven’t had any brand issue by ending your game name with “Tycoon” ?
I similarly assumed that there would probably be issues but, when we looked into it, it turned out there are no trademark issues around "tycoon" and it's used generically as a genre descriptor in the names of lots of games by different companies
Very little of the content in the game even has anything to do with political viewpoints because, contrary to what you might believe, political speech is only a small slice of the content that moderators deal with.
Could definitely package it up as a PC game. Mobile is a lot tougher - the interface doesn't currently support screens below a certain size, and it also relies on mouseover tooltips for conveying important (if technically not 100% critical) information.
Yeah - we certainly investigated engines (Twine and Inkle were our top contenders) but ultimately it seemed easier to get the functionality we wanted by building it ourselves
Nope, not Twine! No engine really - it's built in HTML/Javascript using the Vue.js framework, utilizing a little bit of the engine Randy Lubin (our game-making partner) built for his project StorySynth but mostly built from scratch.
Unfortunately it was issues with the recording itself - not sure if it was the mic or the connection, but that audio is all we got. The only other real option was scrapping it entirely, and I figured the conversation was still worth putting out.
Sometimes, the ability to theoretically handle anything makes it labor-intensive to handle each specific thing :) There definitely is some stuff that seems like it should be easier - but so far, it's capable of doing everything, with effort. And of course, the data migration needs were a big part of the challenge: it wasn't just a matter of building these features, but building them in a way that allowed us to map everything from the old Techdirt onto the new one, with minimal disruption in the continuity of everything functioning, and the goal of a quick migration with up-to-the-minute data that wouldn't require a lengthy shutdown of the site.
If we were building from the ground up for a new site, some things would have been easier - but we were also building for compatibility with the data (and just our user habits) from over 20 years of development on a entirely custom CMS with lots of idiosyncrasies and patchwork workarounds.
We'll definitely give consideration to A through D as we make changes. One thing I can answer now, which is E: it's named the Comment Scrubber after the tools used in audio/video software that show you a condensed waveform/thumbnail timeline and let you quickly shift to that point in the file by clicking. Those are called "scrubbers"! But - it is perhaps true that this terminology isn't clear to a lot of people.
WordPress customer service is definitely not lacking! You would not believe how much work they have done for us for two straight years to make this possible.
I know Techdirt might seem "relatively simple" but the truth is, as blogs go, it's really not. We had added a lot of custom features over the years. Our comment voting/badges system is unlike any out-of-the-box solutions, the membership system is entirely custom tracking multiple different subscription tiers via integration with both Foxycart (for our direct purchase store) and Patreon, lots of our little features our non-standard on blogs these days (user preferences for site display, markdown in comments, the post expander) and some break common rules of modern CMS systems (infinitely-deep comment reply threads). And that's not even getting into some of our non-standard back-end features that we've developed for our editorial flow over the years.
It required a lot of custom work to rebuild it all as a WordPress theme, and then there's the other huge issue: the data migration. Our entire data structure was non-standard, and not easily mapped to WordPress - it required development of a custom, multi-stage process to move over 75,000 posts and a couple million comments and reformat/retabulate everything in a new structure.
The bugs we're seeing now are what remains after making so, so many difficult things work properly. And they certainly do have solutions for everything we're seeing, but some require special work due to all the aforementioned customization. All we can do now is continue to work steadily through them as best we can!
Not in general! We do plan to run a few promos on episodes of the Techdirt podcast, and maybe put some teaser excerpts from this podcast into the Techdirt feed between regular episodes - plus at some point Ben will be joining Mike on the Techdirt Podcast to talk about the launch of Ctrl-Alt-Speech. But other than that additional stuff, the Techdirt Podcast will be proceeding as normal!
I dunno, I think it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi unique to his particular personality disorder.
lol this comment is like an unholy hybrid of a Linda Yaccarino tweet and a Donald Trump tweet
yeah, my bad! Sorry - fixed now
whoops, my bad! I messed up in my copy-pasting! Afraid it was Rhizome's comment that won - fixing it now
I'm fond of this boss music from Pikmin too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXUkxWx40H8
I'm not personally the type to download and listen to an album of retro chiptunes themselves, but there are indeed a lot of bangers in the world of nintendo music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASvFH3w1Ik
Very little of the content in the game even has anything to do with political viewpoints because, contrary to what you might believe, political speech is only a small slice of the content that moderators deal with.
whoops! fixed, thanks
Could definitely package it up as a PC game. Mobile is a lot tougher - the interface doesn't currently support screens below a certain size, and it also relies on mouseover tooltips for conveying important (if technically not 100% critical) information.
Yeah - we certainly investigated engines (Twine and Inkle were our top contenders) but ultimately it seemed easier to get the functionality we wanted by building it ourselves
Nope, not Twine! No engine really - it's built in HTML/Javascript using the Vue.js framework, utilizing a little bit of the engine Randy Lubin (our game-making partner) built for his project StorySynth but mostly built from scratch.
whoops my bad, fixed!
Indeed. At some point that sentence was going to be "the one that won first place" and I guess the wrong word survived :) fixing!
whoops - fixed!
Unfortunately it was issues with the recording itself - not sure if it was the mic or the connection, but that audio is all we got. The only other real option was scrapping it entirely, and I figured the conversation was still worth putting out.
Sometimes, the ability to theoretically handle anything makes it labor-intensive to handle each specific thing :) There definitely is some stuff that seems like it should be easier - but so far, it's capable of doing everything, with effort. And of course, the data migration needs were a big part of the challenge: it wasn't just a matter of building these features, but building them in a way that allowed us to map everything from the old Techdirt onto the new one, with minimal disruption in the continuity of everything functioning, and the goal of a quick migration with up-to-the-minute data that wouldn't require a lengthy shutdown of the site. If we were building from the ground up for a new site, some things would have been easier - but we were also building for compatibility with the data (and just our user habits) from over 20 years of development on a entirely custom CMS with lots of idiosyncrasies and patchwork workarounds.
We'll definitely give consideration to A through D as we make changes. One thing I can answer now, which is E: it's named the Comment Scrubber after the tools used in audio/video software that show you a condensed waveform/thumbnail timeline and let you quickly shift to that point in the file by clicking. Those are called "scrubbers"! But - it is perhaps true that this terminology isn't clear to a lot of people.
WordPress customer service is definitely not lacking! You would not believe how much work they have done for us for two straight years to make this possible. I know Techdirt might seem "relatively simple" but the truth is, as blogs go, it's really not. We had added a lot of custom features over the years. Our comment voting/badges system is unlike any out-of-the-box solutions, the membership system is entirely custom tracking multiple different subscription tiers via integration with both Foxycart (for our direct purchase store) and Patreon, lots of our little features our non-standard on blogs these days (user preferences for site display, markdown in comments, the post expander) and some break common rules of modern CMS systems (infinitely-deep comment reply threads). And that's not even getting into some of our non-standard back-end features that we've developed for our editorial flow over the years. It required a lot of custom work to rebuild it all as a WordPress theme, and then there's the other huge issue: the data migration. Our entire data structure was non-standard, and not easily mapped to WordPress - it required development of a custom, multi-stage process to move over 75,000 posts and a couple million comments and reformat/retabulate everything in a new structure. The bugs we're seeing now are what remains after making so, so many difficult things work properly. And they certainly do have solutions for everything we're seeing, but some require special work due to all the aforementioned customization. All we can do now is continue to work steadily through them as best we can!