Godwin's law in action: Nazis are mentioned in 78% of Reddites with more than 1000 comments
A lover of array processing, hiding under the nickname CuriousGNU, decided to check "Godwin's Law" in relation to the discussions on reddit. An analysis of 4.6 million comments to the reddit posts, conducted using the Google BigQuery service, showed good compliance with the law of reality.
American journalist and writer Michael Wayne Godwin , nicknamed "Mike", has been interested in the Internet since the advent of Usenet, and in 1990 he joined the EFF Foundation ( Electronic Frontier Foundation for Human Rights in the Digital World) and became the first full-time lawyer of the organization.
Being an active user of Usenet and studying the first emerging Internet memes, Mike noticed that in discussions the Nazis or Hitler were constantly appearing in discussions. It seemed so intrusive to him that, as a joke, he derived the Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies : with the growth of the online discussion, the likelihood of mentioning the Nazis or Hitler in it tends to one.
CuriousGNU, as a big data enthusiast, has built several graphs related to this “law”.
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Number of comments that mention the Nazis or Hitler
Interestingly, even if we exclude historical reddits from consideration, Godwin’s law does not work. For posts in which the number of comments exceeded one thousand, the probability of mentioning the Nazis already exceeds 70%. In posts with more than 4,000 comments, the probability tends to 95%.
American journalist and writer Michael Wayne Godwin , nicknamed "Mike", has been interested in the Internet since the advent of Usenet, and in 1990 he joined the EFF Foundation ( Electronic Frontier Foundation for Human Rights in the Digital World) and became the first full-time lawyer of the organization.
Being an active user of Usenet and studying the first emerging Internet memes, Mike noticed that in discussions the Nazis or Hitler were constantly appearing in discussions. It seemed so intrusive to him that, as a joke, he derived the Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies : with the growth of the online discussion, the likelihood of mentioning the Nazis or Hitler in it tends to one.
CuriousGNU, as a big data enthusiast, has built several graphs related to this “law”.
')
Number of comments that mention the Nazis or Hitler
Interestingly, even if we exclude historical reddits from consideration, Godwin’s law does not work. For posts in which the number of comments exceeded one thousand, the probability of mentioning the Nazis already exceeds 70%. In posts with more than 4,000 comments, the probability tends to 95%.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/393735/
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