from the year-in-review dept

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 (🙄), it’s on him to explain that or change the way it appears. Autism should definitely be a mitigating factor when it comes to consequences, but having autism isn’t an excuse to act like a jackass or to make people uncomfortable. The world needs to be accepting of autistic people, but autistic people (ESPECIALLY those of us w/o intellectual disabilities) also need to be good citizens, and understand that the rights to community life come with responsibilities to others… except if they’re billionaires, I guess.

Now, on to the other side of things…

The Funniest Comments Of 2025

Let’s face it, this wasn’t the funniest year. The funny things that did happen were rather overshadowed by America’s slide into authoritarianism and the incredible harm being done to people every day. Nevertheless, commenters came through with a banger here and there, starting with our first place funny comment of the year. Back in March, when the DOGE debacle was being tossed around in the courts, an anonymous commenter rose to the top by coining a new appellation:

Stop calling them the doge crew. They’re twitler youth.

For second place we jump one month earlier to February, and Trump’s absurd renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Another anonymous commenter offered up an observation about the administration’s values:

Curious how only in this one instance the Trump Administration is upset about deadnaming.

To round things out with third place, we have yet another anonymous comment (that’s right, they dominated the funny leaderboard this year!) from that very same post about renaming the Gulf. This time, it’s a comment venting some understandable frustration with a healthy dose of sarcasm:

I couldn’t be happier!

So many Magaheads who are complaining about Latin Americans with an 8th grade education taking their jobs are saying this is what will really solve the immigration issue, grocery costs, inflation, the price of gas, stimulate oil drilling, end the war in Ukraine, get all the hostages freed, and send a clear message to our foes and allies alike that we’re a serious country. (Not to mention grow the GDP by 2% every 5 minutes, cut the deficit by $30 trillion, turn North Korea and Gaza into popular tourist destinations, and eliminate all those damn electric cars.)

Who knew it was so simple?

America, that’s who! An example for the world on how being simple can demand such respect!

And now, to wrap things up…

The Outliers

The aforementioned first place winner on the funny side was also the second place winner for combined votes for both categories, but the other two of the top three on this leaderboard made it there without cracking the top three of either category individually. In first place for combined votes, it’s another comment from Thad, this time about the Supreme Court’s April ruling that the administration can’t just human-traffick people to foreign prisons (though they weren’t sure how to stop them):

Wow, I never realized that Thomas, Alito, and all three of Trump’s appointees were Marxists.

Then, in third place for combined votes, we’ve got a comment from TheHangNail about Trump’s very incorrect claim in March that boycotting Tesla is illegal:

Up is Down

Wait, it was ok to boycott Bud Light because a trans person was shown drinking one for 30 seconds but boycotting a company because its CEO is systematically destroying our civic structure is not ok?

Maybe we need to get as many trans people as possible to video themselves driving Teslas. It will, at the very least, confuse the heck out of the right.

And with that, we close the books on 2025! Thanks again to our amazing community here for always keeping the comments flowing, and making sure there’s plenty of great content for both our weekly and yearly posts. I can’t wait to see the discussion that happens in 2026.