78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis

http://www.curiousgnu.com/reddit-godwin

by gk1 • 10 years ago

303 201 10 years ago

wahsd• 10 years ago

It's kind of the de facto escape hatch for some and a baseline analogy many can comprehend because of decade long conditioning. It does not surprise me one bit.

What's always rather surprised me though is that no one seems to have realized that the decades of collective shaming of Germans for having gone through the national socialist dictatorship and war, has led to a deeply lost and self-loathing society without pride, dignity, or healthy identity. The society is in rather advanced stages self-destruction and decomstruction. The question is really only whether German culture and society will at all survive it's suicidal tendencies.

WaxProlix• 10 years ago

Perhaps if there were some sort of party that could rise to prominence on a platform of making Germany great again?

mwfunk• 10 years ago

Even more effective if the supposed reasons for non-greatness are one or more groups of faceless Others, within and without the country. Someone could go far in politics this way, with convenient scapegoats they could promise to drive out of the country, and perhaps even build a wall for keeping them out. Not that that would ever happen nowadays, what with millennia of history to learn from...

clock_tower7• 10 years ago

I think that, in a way, the developing immigrant crisis (look at the problems at Cologne on New Year's) is going to be a good thing for Germany, forcing them to determine what parts of their heritage are worth standing up for after all. The Greek crisis was also an example of Germany standing up for themselves; I think that, if you ask the Germans, they've made as much restitution for the Nazi period as it's meaningful to make (look up the details, they're pretty formidable), and at this point improvident foreigners looking for handouts and talking about Hitler are just engaged in bullying.

In the long run, I expect Germany to survive, but I'm not making the same bet on the US. I'm planning on moving from the US to Ireland at some point; I don't really want to be here, or to make my children be here, for the chaos almost certain to ensue 40-50 years from now. (Or 10-20 years from now, if we end up with President The Donald and he keeps his campaign promises.)

rm_-rf_slash7• 10 years ago

I'm not making the same bet on the US

As The Economist put it, America has "friends to the north and south and fish to the east and west." If anything truly threatens the US, it is ourselves. The idea that anyone could sustain supply lines to invade the States is out of their mind or has fallen asleep too many times to reruns of Red Dawn.

rm_-rf_slash7• 10 years ago

Sadly I think you're right. A reflexive anti-national shame is probably the cause of the myopic dream of multiculturalism, where culture and ethnicity and very old instincts about judging people who look different from you don't matter anymore, now and forever.

It's almost as if some Germans are so ashamed of their national past that they would rather see nationalism eliminated entirely than to accept the messy world as it is.

Ironically, I am now realizing how much of a burden that ideology is being forced on much of Europe, not necessarily the same way that the Nazis conquered Europe, but in the same insistence that they are ultimately right.

eridius2• 10 years ago

Interesting, but I'm a bit disappointed the author didn't at least try to filter out things like "grammar nazi" or, as might be found in r/seinfeld, "soup nazi".

comboy• 10 years ago

Yeah, or "I did nazi that coming", the bigger the thread the more memes are in it.

samcheng• 10 years ago

Right; I'd guess that at least half of the 'nazi' mentions are actually lame puns.

dTal• 10 years ago

Ctrl-F "nazi that"... yep.

I don't think we can draw any conclusions from this beyond the fact that the Reddit hive mind thinks Godwin's law is hilarious and mentions Hitler at every opportunity.

gkya3• 10 years ago

In this post, I’ll only try to find out how many Reddit comments mention Nazis or Hitler and ignore the context in which they are made.

jshevek• 10 years ago

Did you think the person posting didn't see this text? He is commenting directly on this choice.

gist• 10 years ago

Sure but is there really a big difference between these sentences:

"And in the end anyone who feels like that reminds me of the Nazi's"

"The Nazis did that and you see what happened to them"

"The way he makes comments it's like he's a grammar nazi"

sosborn• 10 years ago

Sure but is there really a big difference between these sentences:

Yes.

zumatic• 10 years ago

...and what about words which contain the string "...nazi...", such as "Ashkenazim"? They don't seem to give the exact query, that I could see.

ry_ry• 10 years ago

I'd imagine Ashkenazim doesn't turn up often enough to be statistically significant.

hristov• 10 years ago

I suppose that reddit threads with 1000+ comments will mention a lot of things. Seeing how they have so many comments and so much text and all.

diyorgasms2• 10 years ago

It's interesting that the highest non-history subreddit is /r/european, which is a neo-nazi forum. Cool dataset at least.

spriggan3• 10 years ago

it's also interesting that r/socialism , r/anarchism , r/gamerghazi which are respectively socialist , anarchist and anti-gamergate forums are on the top of the list.

diyorgasms2• 10 years ago

Well, from my experience hanging around in leftist subreddits, I can say there's an awful lot of loud and repeated objection to the Reddit admins harboring neo-nazi fora such as the aforementioned /r/european. Whether the admins allowing that speech is virtuous or villainous is a different debate, but the leftist subs routinely criticize Reddit the company for harboring actual Nazis.

cb18• 10 years ago

/r/european, which is a neo-nazi forum

That's not an accurate characterization.

There is an element of that, but it is frequently pushed back against.

It's mostly people who are dismayed by this recent migrant madness and the resultant massive spike in horrible crimes.

It is ostensibly also just a place for discussion of european culture but attention to the migrant madness, and seeking political solutions for it dominates the conversation because the issue is so heavily censored elsewhere on reddit.

edit: And it's highly likely that the vast majority of occurences of the string 'nazi' in that sub are in the context of satirical postings like, Oh, you think borders should be secure and rapists should be prosecuted? You must be a nazi!

cr18952• 10 years ago

Alright, sure, to be more precise it is both neo-nazi and white supremacist.

I thought I'd have to look at least a little bit harder than literally the first link I clicked, but: https://www.reddit.com/r/european/comments/4htthg/til_muslim...

Some choice comments include "sieg heil, NSB (Dutch fascists) was not wrong," comments about "negroid France," calls to poison halal food, issues they find with the survival of the white race due to the "blacks" and Muslims.

It is not a place for discussion of European culture. It is a vile cesspool of racists and hate.

to3m2• 10 years ago

/r/ukpolitics is somewhat similar.

What does 18 signify?

noelsusman• 10 years ago

No, you're describing elements of /r/europe. /r/european is a straight up neo-nazi white supremacist forum that occasionally operates under the guise of being concerned about extremist immigrants.

There's literally a stickied post about Holocaust denial right now.

Negative12• 10 years ago

So is his extrapolation that at 4k+ it will reach towards 100%?

vernie• 10 years ago

Right, the first line of the post.

Negative12• 10 years ago

Downvotes for summing up the whole article into a simple concept?

rm_-rf_slash7• 10 years ago

Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil. You don't need to show a Nazi kicking a puppy to say the Nazi is evil, because they're already a Nazi! We get it.

The downside of this shorthand is that it dumbs down conversation. The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn't be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective, and the accused has less incentive to cordially communicate when it is clear that they are not being taken seriously, so either reasonable people leave or inflammatory folks troll, and we're all worse off.

tstactplsignore2• 10 years ago

At the same time, not all Nazi analogies are equally wrong- it's fallacious to claim that moustaches are evil because Nazis had them; it isn't exactly fallacious to claim that persecuting and demonizing a minority combined with enthusiastic nationalism through slowly increasing propaganda campaigns under the leadership of a charismatic leader should seem at least slightly worrying because we have Nazis as a historical example. The Nazis and the 30s and 40s can present real historical lessons- another is that in the 30s, the German Communist party declared "After him, us!" in response to Hitler's rise and their refusal to cooperate with the socialists, with the reasoning being that his disastrous short term would hasten about a communist revolution. Unfortunately, we often see the exact same argument used by both socialists and some of the more extreme Bernie Sanders fans today with regards to Trump. There are historical lessons and analogies in the past which can be genuinely useful to understanding the present. At this rate, it feels like if 1930s Germany had Godwin's law, it would have been used to quash any dissent about the actual rise of Nazism.

rm_-rf_slash7• 10 years ago

You're right. Too right. The Nazis are a rightfully perfect metaphor for these times and many others.

But there are always exceptions. Nobody is wheelbarrowing carts of Deutschmarks to buy a loaf of bread. Race (and the idea of inherent superiority/inferiority) is viewed much differently, in fact until the 70s it was generally accepted that Neanderthals became whites, Homo Erectus became Asians, and so on. And if the post-Cold War era has taught us anything, there is no "End of History" where humanity converges along the One True Path.

No analogy is perfect. American slaves had little relation to Roman slaves aside from being owned people. Too much has changed since the 30s to be an exact repeat.

zeemonkee3• 10 years ago

the German Communist party declared "After him, us!"

They were kind of prophetic about that.

wildmusings4• 10 years ago

Good job sneaking in a comparison of Trump to the Nazis without a shred of supporting argument. I'm no Trump fan but the comparisons to Hitler are totally unwarranted.

Take his most controversial proposal. Deporting 11 million people--who don't have the right to be here in the first place--is bad policy and callous, but it's fair.

There's plenty of examples of populist nationalist leaders hurting their countries, like Berlusconi in Italy. No need to raise the false specter of concentration camps, mass murder, and totalitarianism.

btilly2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, we often see the exact same argument used by both socialists and some of the more extreme Bernie Sanders fans today with regards to Trump.

Why do you consider this unfortunate?

First of all it is not just those groups. Are you aware that the same comparison has been made by Holocaust survivors like Anne Frank's step-sister, national leaders such as the president of Mexico, and prominent conservatives like Glenn Beck? It isn't just a few socialists who are concerned.

That said, it would be unfortunate if the assertion had no basis in reality.

But does it? According to political scientists, the one trait that is most likely to predict you supporting Trump is how much you tend towards authoritarianism. This is why extremely authoritarian groups such as the KKK and neo-nazis have come out in support of Trump. Extreme authoritarianism certainly matches Hitler.

Next there is the question of truthfulness. According to Politifact, over 2/3 of Trump's public statements are lies. In fact he's more likely to issue "pants on fire" lies than to say something that is true or mostly true. (See http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/ for a source.) Furthermore when he lies and is challenged on it, he shows no regard for the truth. Instead he repeats his lies over and over again, very forcefully. This "Big Lie" technique was a classic trademark of Hitler's.

What else is characteristic of Hitler? Extreme nationalism! Do I need to enumerate instances?

How about war mongering? Oh boy. So far Trump has promised to bomb North Korea, Syria and Isis. He has also suggested bombing Iraq and starting a trade war with Mexico to get them to pay for the wall he wants.

What about mass deportion? Hitler promised to deport the Jews, then killed them when nobody else wanted to take them. Trump promises to deport about 11 million people from the USA. How do you think that will work in practice?

You apparently think that Trump/Hitler comparisons are unfortunate. I consider it a quick way of identifying all of the characteristics that Trump has which make me afraid of the possibility of his being President.

lazaroclapp2• 10 years ago

Do you happen to have a source for the "After him, us!" quote? I can't seem to find it, at least not literally. Googling for that phrase and 'german' gives me this thread.

lqdc13• 10 years ago

Also shows how much of an echo chamber it is. You cannot accuse someone of being a Nazi and get upvoted if people aren't already on your side.

stcredzero16• 10 years ago

Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil.

It's often that, but it's often not only that. It's often a shorthand for extreme political ideology leading to authoritarianism. It's a shorthand for a particular affective/mental state groups of people can enter into. (1) The country that became Nazi Germany was highly educated, western, democratic, and industrialized. Germans are ordinary people, just like you and me. There is nothing peculiar or special or demonizing about them, or Russians or Chinese or Cambodians or Americans or any other group containing members who have enacted mass killings and genocide.

Our species' brain is wired to enable us gang-up together, feel solidarity, and take action against other groups. The way this happens fits certain functional objective patterns of behavior, and Nazis are a very prominent mental "attractor." Unfortunately, "Nazi" has such a strong emotional connotation, it renders rational thought about such group dynamics difficult in any public communications medium.

The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn't be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective

It's also often used to talk about attributes and events that are historically comparable to the activities of the Nazi party in its early, obscure days, before it had political power. The same group dynamics that applies to them, applies to other groups of people all throughout history. Unfortunately, the comparison it has such strong emotional connotations, the irrational feelings drown out useful rational discussion.

From what I've seen, invocations of "Godwin's Law" are often used by people who are subject to the beginnings of the same group-dynamic negative-affective death spiral -- precisely to shut down discussion of the phenomena they are subject to. This culture sorely needs a way to calmly and meaningfully discuss such group-dynamics. If society was 1/10th as savvy about group dynamics as it is savvy about the cognitive bias caused by love and sexual desire, we'd be vastly more advanced.

(1) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11630275

rm_-rf_slash7• 10 years ago

You make a great argument, but I fear that until we have no global population of have-nots, even an educated society can fall victim to manipulatiors who need not believe their own rhetoric.

I doubt Trump truly believes what he says about Mexicans and Muslims, but he sees clearly that they are effective scapegoats, and frustrated people are easy to placate with blame on someone else.

littletimmy2• 10 years ago

I think you're right, but one could also argue that such "gang-up together, feel solidarity, and take action against" behavior is natural to humans. It is in war that the greatest technological advances take place, and it is in solidarity that societies flourish. Is that better or worse for the human species in the long term?

ams61102• 10 years ago

It's also a humorous reference to anyone seen as rigidly authoritarian. Where I work we have the neighborhood parking nazis who ticket cars without parking permits. We have the expense nazis who review our expense reimbursement request. Etc.

chippy• 10 years ago

If society was 1/10th as savvy about group dynamics as it is savvy about the cognitive bias caused by love and sexual desire, we'd be vastly more advanced.

I believe that all the troubles with "harrasment" in online communities is about group dynamics. Its when one group encounters another and identifies them as other (and not similar).

Reddit also shows it too - but has a "No brigading" rule - they know that groups attack other groups and has a rule in place.

Twitter is a better example - the controls are more about the individual and not the group - about individual behaviour on the platform - but the groups are there and very strong. For example, people may identify with the pro-Smith presidential campaign and bump up against people who are pro-Baker. The intersections where groups meet occur all the time in twitter but actual explicit grouping is almost impossible.

I'm thinking of a kind of new service where people can assign themselves to groups both physical and virtual. And can assign others to groups too.

More visibility of groups should be a good thing, I think. I imagine for example that bystanders to pro presidential groups arguing would be able to label this as an inter-group interaction and be able to filter this out perhaps. Or I imagine that simply knowing that that attack from left field about some subject was due to the attackers belonging to a group and being able to understand that ideology. I'm being naive here, of course. What I want to happen is to increase the understanding of group dynamics in people to reduce undue suffering.

To see ones own groups as being flexible and to see what ideas come from ones own groups and then seeing other people in their groups and seeing the same for them.

antisthenes• 10 years ago

The problem with that analysis is that you're expecting quality conversation from threads with 1000+ comments in which comment threads themselves are largely insulated from each other. There are very rarely reference to another comment thread within the same post, which leads to isolation and localized groupthink.

Generally speaking, threads of that size imply that they are posted on a very popular public subreddit, which requires no special qualifications to post in. Invariably this leads to at least _some_ comment threads being low quality.

I would not be surprised if the majority of such highly commented posts contained isolated comment threads with racist remarks.

SolarNet• 10 years ago

It's not a recent thing either. Before nazis it was the pharaohs.

munchbunny• 10 years ago

It's also a shorthand for "I'm going to nitpick your grammar but I don't want to be downvoted into oblivion so I will call myself a grammar nazi".

I'd be curious about a breakdown of usage in the instances of nazis being mentioned... I wonder if many of these usages are actually referencing the German National Socialist party of the 1930s/1940s.

raldi2• 10 years ago

That stat is hard to interpret in a vacuum.

What percent of such threads contain a comment that mentions potatoes, or bismuth, or juggling?

tyingq• 10 years ago

Or cats.

christianmann• 10 years ago

Or nazi cats.

jsmthrowaway• 10 years ago

Did you guys run any sort of analysis like this, on comment content in aggregate, during your tenure? I would guess with all of that data it'd be fun for hackathons to come up with interesting conversation starters like this one, despite the flaw you point out.

Glad folks are putting together these datasets now, too, if informally.

raldi2• 10 years ago

No; we were usually too busy just keeping the site up and trying to generate revenue.... though actually, there were occasional times where we said "fuck that" and took a break to work on something fun, like an April Fools stunt.

If anyone did such an analysis, it would have been ketralnis.

hamhamed• 10 years ago

Maybe try it on HN threads, don't think Godwin's Law would be as effective

stepvhen• 10 years ago

HN threads don't go above 1000 nearly as often as Reddit, without any regard to the differences in audience, or the size of the audience, or the scale of the content availavle to comment on.

minimaxir6• 10 years ago

Unlike Reddit, invoking Godwin's Law in Hacker News will get your comment killed.

mynewtb• 10 years ago

Yes, the moderation is literally Hitler here.

blazespin• 10 years ago

So .001 * .78 or, .00078 of comments mention nazis.

tyenl• 10 years ago

I think the thread is counted if there is at least 1 mention of nazis in the thread.

Therefore it is possible that there are multiple mentions per counted thread meaning that at least .00078 comments mention nazis, but in all likelihood far more comments mention nazis.

Edit: after reading the article, I don't think that this observation stands.

minimaxir6• 10 years ago

Technically not correct. The OP only looks at threads w/ 1000+ comments.

The vast majority of threads on Reddit have less than that. (see: http://jeroendelcour.nl/blog/Reddits-attention-inequality )

nxzero• 10 years ago

Use of the term should just throw a flag and information the user that users able allowed to filter comments based on keyword and if there comment will not be viewable to XX% of the community. Second, mods should still be reviewing the community for inappropriate behavior.

While I'd never use the term, it's a good reminder that what words you choose often define you.

pessimizer• 10 years ago

It's important to remember that civilized intellectual Westerners relatively recently democratically elected leaders who shovelled intellectual, sexual, and racial minorities into mass graves based on magical theories.

mg1982• 10 years ago

True. But not important - or salient - 78% of the time on popular Reddit threads, right?

tn13• 10 years ago

I am not surprised and I don't find it alarming. More comments means more fights and words like "Nazi" are bound to appear because it is basically a slang for evil.

Forget reddit, a quick look at American politics itself shows very liberal use of phrases like Fascist and Nazi when in reality people probably mean just evil.

anonymous_iam• 10 years ago

Thus Goodwin's Law has been proven to be true once again.

brotoss• 10 years ago

I did Nazi see that coming!

compactmani• 10 years ago

Allow me to make a more general conjecture: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving word_x or word_y approaches 1.

christiangenco• 10 years ago

My thoughts exactly. I won't put any credence in this information until I see a graph comparing the relative frequency of "nazi" as discussions grow with "Justin Bieber", "anosmia", and "Kevin Bacon".

kazinator4• 10 years ago

Why? The definition isn't relative to these in any way. It doesn't say that Nazi mentions are more frequent than Bieber mentions. Just that it's more likely to occur in longer threads relative to shorter threads.

cableshaft• 10 years ago

Somewhere the people in a subreddit are kicking themselves for not doing their jobs well enough to bring that up to 98%.

kazinator4• 10 years ago

To validate Godwin's Law, you have to apply it properly.

What Godwin's Law refers to is this: either an ad hominem attack occurs in which some debating parties compares their opponent(s) to Nazi's, or else some other sort of non-constructive, inappropriate comparison is made between some subject and the Nazis. ("Those crazy GNU Nazis don't want anyone to get paid for programming." "I'm gonna ignore you topic Nazis and write about whatever I want.")

Simply mentioning Hitler or the Nazi party is not enough; there are valid, constructive ways to do that. For instance, a legitimate thread about WWII history will probably mention Hitler or the Nazis! Also, comparing any violently repressive regime to the Nazis is completely valid.

stepanhruda2• 10 years ago

Did you read the article?

Then I excluded history subreddits

kazinator4• 10 years ago

How can you be sure that an ad hominem attack or other inappropriate invocation of the Nazis doesn't take place in a history subreddit that is also chock full of legitimate references?

S_A_P• 10 years ago

So I know that reddit has always been a bit more crass than your average community, and this could totally be me. But the last time I pulled up reddit to waste some time, I seemed to notice that more pseudo porn, wtf and generally nsfw stuff was on the front page. I personally don't care that is the case per se, but its utility as something to introduce me to something new/interesting seems to be vastly reduced. Maybe I should just yell get off of my lawn and move on.

askyourmother• 10 years ago

I think a thread being godwin'd on reddit, is like any programming thread on HN getting dragged down into "but, you should use Rust."

Annoying, very annoying, and a hard problem to solve.

AimHere• 10 years ago

It's solved by the OP of every programming thread using Rust of course!

vlunkr• 10 years ago

This was how it was the first time I visited reddit, they have since changed the default sub-reddits to much less NSFW stuff.

sudojudo• 10 years ago

Reddit has suffered from Eternal September for quite some time.

There's a really good article on this subject that I can't seem to locate. But, if you put Reddit into the Wayback Machine, you'll see the frontpage transform over time, from something like Slashdot in 2009, to a meme image board in 2012, to a cleaned-up, marketing-friendly, image board in 2014, to the Facebook-feed-like mess that you see today.

When I first joined, the default frontpage was fine. But after time, I had to edit out default subreddits from the main feed. The final straw, in around 2013, was not being able to escape trolls and punsters, anywhere on the site.

These days, if I browse Reddit, I restrict myself to heavily moderated subs, like /r/askhistorians and /r/askscience, and subs with less than a thousand subscribers. Anywhere else on the site is like visiting the Facebook page of a 14-year-old Nazi womanizer with a Trump infatuation.

AOL and Windows 95 ruined everything!

Patient0• 10 years ago

I bet you could find other words than "Nazis" for which this is also true...

ninjakeyboard• 10 years ago

per a random selection of 1000 comments, how how likely is it that a comment will contain mention of nazis?

Someone2• 10 years ago

So, is that a lot? Let’s assume a very simple model, with Reddit writers picking words from a fixed distribution, 10 words per reply, and all ‘over 1,000 comments’ threads having exactly 1000 comments.

Then, if the probability of picking ‘fried rice’ is p, the probability of ‘fried rice’ not appearing in that 1,000 comment, 10,000 word thread is

  (1-p)^10000

That apparently, is around 0.22:

  (1-p)^10000 = 0.22

Solving for p gives us

  10000 log(1-p) = log(.22)

  log(1-p) = log(.22)/10000

  1-p = exp(log(.22)/10000)

  p = 1 - exp(log(.22)/10000)

That’s about 0.000066, or 1 in 15,000.

Let’s compare that with https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nazi&year_star....

That gives us numbers close to 0.000066, but only for the mid 1940’s. Current level is around 0.000008 or 1 in 125,000. Let’s compute how many words such a long Reddit thread needs to get at that level:

  (1-0.000008)^w = 0.22

  w log(1-0.000008) = log(0.22)

  w = log(0.22)/log(1-0.000008)

That gives me around 190.000 words. That does not seem impossible for me. If long threads on average have 2,500 comments, it is only 36 words per comment. One would have to look at the distribution of thread length and #words/comment to say more about this.

Now, let’s hope there isn’t an embarrassing error in the above computations :-)

webkike• 10 years ago

Where did you get that the probability of a thousand word comment not containing the fried rice is 0.22?

0xffff2• 10 years ago

"Fried rice" is a standin for nazis/Hitler, so 1-0.78=0.22.

minimaxir6• 10 years ago

Bernoulli trials assume events are independent. That is likely not a good assumption in this case.

Bartweiss2• 10 years ago

It seems like a terrible assumption for this case.

Godwin's Law is largely a specific case of conversational drift (unless you start out talking about Nazis). Everyone starts out on topic, then gets more hyperbolic and distracted until you end up at some other idea, in this case Nazis.

So not only are comments in threads not independent samples, we're specifically looking at a proposition about non-independence.

ececconi2• 10 years ago

People don't pick words from a fixed distribution in the manner which you wrote. I scanned over 500,000 words I wrote and I never mentioned the word mentioned on the headline of this article. I'm not sure if any kind of meaningful interpretation can be made from the headline, but I think it's an interesting observation nonetheless.

hrayr• 10 years ago

I scanned over 500,000 words I wrote and I never mentioned the word mentioned on the headline of this article.

Funny how you're trying to avoid breaking your streak of not mentioning nazis.

Someone2• 10 years ago

People do not do that, but at least it is a model that one can improve. For example, as other commenters indicate, one can argument that occurrences within threads will be correlated (that will happen in discussions about World War Two, for example) but others indicated that "Godwin's law" occurrences may follow the model better.

In contrast, the OP just presented a bare number, implying that it was high, but without any evidence for that claim.

And yes, there's lots of room for improvement. The model is very simple, the guesses at the Reddit thread sizes are 100% guesses (how long is the average comment? What's the distribution of thread lengths? Etc), I did some serious rounding here and there, trusted Google to do the math right (it is not that hard, but IEEE may be insufficient to get results that are somewhat correct, and I don't know what Google does), etc.

As to your "I never wrote nasi goreng in 500,000 words" argument: let's take my simple/flawed model. It predicts

  (1-1/125000)^500000 ~= 0.018

as the probability that 500,000 words do not contain "taboo". So, that simple/rough/flawed model predicts that, out of 1000 people writing 500,000 words, 18 wouldn't mention "Voldemort". You could easily be one of them. It's about as likely as somebody flipping 6 heads in a row. So, I don't think that single data point invalidates the model (no, I haven't done the proper statistics)

rossdavidh• 10 years ago

I think it would be a better comparison to simply pick 100 other words, perhaps proper nouns like "Communist", "Stalin", "Fascist", "Mussolini", "Khmer Rouge", "Pol Pot", and etc. Do the same analysis with these, and it will tell you if Godwin's Law is telling us something unique about this particular bugbear. (I suspect it is, but haven't run the comparison myself)

coldtea4• 10 years ago

Well, all those are simple regimes or dictators etc, whereas Nazi has been relegated to stand in for the ultimate evil, or as a synonym for evil itself.

WalterBright• 10 years ago

190.000 words

The average TV vocabulary is 2,000 words. High school graduates average a 10,000 word vocabulary, college graduates 30,000, and there are over a million words in the English language. Hence having 190,000 distinct words in a reddit thread seems implausible.

valleyer• 10 years ago

They needn't be distinct. Writing is random selection with replacement.

GCA10• 10 years ago

I'm amazed that a full 22% of ultra-sustained Reddit threads are completely free of Nazi references. That's a beautiful display of self-restraint by a big crowd in an ugly world.

I would have pegged the odds of sustained Nazi-free discourse on Reddit as comparable to -- say -- the odds of finding 1,000 Medium posts without the word "f*ck" or its variants in any of the headlines.

djscram• 10 years ago

Seems likely that most 1,000+ comment threads are political.

minimaxir6• 10 years ago

Incorrect. Most 1,000 comment threads are in the default subreddits.

Using BigQuery to group the number of threads by subreddit:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_bL0dVn3z2R-pUkWuWNr...

   SELECT subreddit, SUM(num_comments >= 1000) as num_comments_gte1000
   FROM [fh-bigquery:reddit_posts.full_corpus_201512]
   GROUP BY subreddit
   ORDER BY num_comments_gte1000 DESC
   LIMIT 1000

NoMoreNicksLeft• 10 years ago

Novelty account names tend to have references, just saw one the other day where not only did a commenter have the username of "Hitlerly Litler" or something to that effect, but someone pointed it out with the /u/username syntax because they thought it was funny.

If they're doing naive string searches, does every thread that guy shows up in get counted? What about robot_hitler, MeinFurher, and all the others?

Did anyone control for the topic very well? Many of the current news stories deal with fascism, or things people might worry to be fascism or totalitarianism or genocide.

beat• 10 years ago

40% of Reddit threads with 1000+ comments involve photos of kittens, including all 22% that don't mention Nazis. That means 18% of Reddit threads involve both kittens and Nazis.

minimaxir6• 10 years ago

Your snark with made-up numbers assumes that p(kitten) and p(nazi) are independent. Which they aren't.

astazangasta• 10 years ago

Hey, maybe it's just worthwhile talking about Nazis? World War II was one of the most catastrophic failures in the history of the world, and the rise of Nazism was an enormous subcategory of failure. These events defined the shape of the century; they demonstrated the horrific extremes to which humanity can descend, and they're absolutely worth appreciating so that we can forestall their reappearance again.

Moreover, it's not like the Nazis just went away; they continued to exist, and the ideologies that produced them not only still exist but are once again becoming a powerful political force.

So fuck yeah, everyone, talk about Nazis. It's one of the most important things you can talk about. (But read Hannah Arendt first.)

mikestew• 10 years ago

⌘-F "Godwin" shows me seven usages in this thread. I was looking for something like "see, Godwin was right". One commenter seems to have gotten it right. The rest think it's something one "invokes" (to quote one usage). Godwin's law is like the law of gravity: it always existed (in Godwin's case, post-WWII, obviously), whether you "used" it or not. You drop an apple, it'll hit the ground. An online discussion (or probably any discussion) grows longer, someone's going to make a Nazi comparison, which this article seems to confirm.

hellofunk• 10 years ago

I'm sure there are other common words in most/all of those threads that wouldn't surprise us.

loblollyboy• 10 years ago

and only 65% of hn threads

Bartweiss2• 10 years ago

I'd like to propose Godwin's Number: the number of responses needed to produce a 50% chance of a reference to Nazis.

timdellinger• 10 years ago

I like it! It can be thought of as an LD50.

coldtea4• 10 years ago

So? It's like mentioning good or evil.

"Nazi" is just a stand-in for "the worst evil" (or sometimes just for plain evil).

It's also a major historical and political even of the 20th century, with tons of analogies and lessons to draw from.

I always found Goodwin's law (and especially the corollary, since the law is just a funny observation) BS.

jamesblonde• 10 years ago

Is the code available for this in github? The dataset is 370 GB, i think. What did the author use - postgres/Spark/other?

skeletonjelly• 10 years ago

BigQuery, it's mentioned in the linked article.

http://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_co...

Probably this dataset which is updated periodically

blater• 10 years ago

First rule of the Internet : all comment threads tend towards comparison to hitler. Multiply by 20 for YouTube.

JBReefer• 10 years ago

That's called Godwin's Law

qwertyuiop924• 10 years ago

Was anybody surprised by this?

orionblastar• 10 years ago

Yeah a thread will eventually have someone comparing someone else to Hitler or Nazis. It is Godwin's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

known• 10 years ago

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

sandGorgon• 10 years ago

anybody what is the exact query being used ?

ck2• 10 years ago

Well Nazis were arguably the biggest stain ever on human history.

Pretty much a reference point for any human being who has gotten some education.

Also a handy, lazy way to box-up anyone you disagree with or want to troll.

As generations move further and further away from WW2 people may stop relating to it though. Hard to imagine kids in 2100 using Nazi references. Might be climate destruction references instead.

awalton• 10 years ago

... does this correct for non-Nazi Nazi usage? Like "Grammar nazi" or "Spelling nazi"?

shitgoose• 10 years ago

181 comments and already 35 mentions of Trump. Beats Godwin.

stefanix• 10 years ago

It would be more interesting to compare TTH (Time To Hitler) on different websites. Not sure reddit is a contender. Maybe look over to Fox news.

78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis

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