- Then I excluded history subreddits and looked at the probability that a Reddit thread mentions Nazis or Hitler at least once. Unsuprisigly, the probability of a Nazi refrence increases as the threads get bigger. Nevertheless, I didn’t expect that the probability would be over 70% for a thread with more than 1,000 comments.
I'm not a fan of Reddit at all. But this is less an indicator of how fall Reddit has fallen and more a confirmation that Goodwin's Law is a real thing.
The blogger expressly states that his data mining doesn't attempt to show that:
- Let me start this post by noting that I will not attempt to test Godwin’s Law,
and:
- The next step would be to implement sophisticated text mining techniques to identify comments which use Nazi analogies in a way as described by Godwin. Unfortunately due to time constraints and the complexity of this problem, I was not able to try for this blog post.
There's not enough context in his data for him to determine that. Since history is the sub with the highest amounts of matches, it might be that people are using the words in the normal context of the words. It might just show that the history and political subs have a lot of posts where the word is appropriately used in context.
I agree that it's doubtful and that this is some evidence for Godwin's Law, but it's not necessarily causal based on his methods at this point.
Out of curiosity, what is the greatest number of comments that a Hubski thread has received?
I would not disagree, but comment, that our Pubskis get pretty big. They regularly surpass 100 comments, and for me, 100 comments on a thread is a lot for Hubski.
Though didn't we have problems with one very heated discussion that hit over 150 comments and new threads had to be started because the thread load started borking?
It's a kleinbl00 comment, I forget exactly which one but a while back we determined it.
Ah. Okay. It's definitely during the circlejerk bullshit. They like to comment and say nothing, many times over.
277 comments is the most I have seen on Hubski. And indeed it was a reddit invasion.
On reddit there were 358,913 comments on a meaningless blog post.
And 146,676 comments in this circlejerk.
When I look at the listed subReddits, the subs were mostly drama related, some country related ones and politics or political systems related.
It's easy to see why those subs would generate that word.
It's less clear if that's indicative of anything else going on there. The statistic is interesting but the analysis is not very compelling.