May 8, 2016 at 23:53Godwin's Law in action: 78% of reddits with more than 1000 comments mention Nazis
The fan of processing data arrays, hiding under the nickname CuriousGNU, decided to check the "Godwin Law" in relation to the discussions on reddit. An analysis of 4.6 million comments on reddit posts using the Google BigQuery service showed good compliance with the law of reality.
The American journalist and writer Michael Wayne Godwin , nicknamed “Mike,” has been interested in the Internet since Usenet, and in 1990 joined the EFF ( Digital Frontier Foundation for Human Rights in the Digital World) Foundation and became the organization’s first full-time lawyer.
Being an active Usenet user and studying the first Internet memes that appeared, Mike noticed that in discussions with enviable consistency, references to the Nazis or Hitler surfaced. It seemed so obsessive to him that he jokingly deduced the " Godwin Law of Nazi Analogies ": with the growth of online discussion, the probability of mentioning Nazis or Hitler in it tends to unity.
CuriousGNU, as a big data enthusiast, has built several graphs related to this “law."
Number of comments mentioning the Nazis or Hitler
It is interesting that, even excluding historical reddites from consideration, it is impossible to get away from Godwin's law. For posts in which the number of comments has exceeded one thousand, the probability of mentioning the Nazis already exceeds 70%. In posts with more than 4000 comments, the probability tends to 95%.
The American journalist and writer Michael Wayne Godwin , nicknamed “Mike,” has been interested in the Internet since Usenet, and in 1990 joined the EFF ( Digital Frontier Foundation for Human Rights in the Digital World) Foundation and became the organization’s first full-time lawyer.
Being an active Usenet user and studying the first Internet memes that appeared, Mike noticed that in discussions with enviable consistency, references to the Nazis or Hitler surfaced. It seemed so obsessive to him that he jokingly deduced the " Godwin Law of Nazi Analogies ": with the growth of online discussion, the probability of mentioning Nazis or Hitler in it tends to unity.
CuriousGNU, as a big data enthusiast, has built several graphs related to this “law."
Number of comments mentioning the Nazis or Hitler
It is interesting that, even excluding historical reddites from consideration, it is impossible to get away from Godwin's law. For posts in which the number of comments has exceeded one thousand, the probability of mentioning the Nazis already exceeds 70%. In posts with more than 4000 comments, the probability tends to 95%.