
78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis - gk1
http://www.curiousgnu.com/reddit-godwin
======
Someone
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...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nazi&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=5).

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
:-)

~~~
ececconi
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
> 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.

~~~
ececconi
Yep, a little joke.

------
rm_-rf_slash
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.

~~~
tstactplsignore
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_.

~~~
marcoperaza
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.

~~~
lazaroclapp
"the false specter of concentration camps"

Because this is a civilized justice system reacting to people whose only crime
is to be residing in a place or working without proper authorization:
[https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G...](https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G_20100723214924.jpg)

Don't get me wrong, I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be
burned at the ovens' stage. But you know what Trump calls the picture above?
He calls it being too soft on immigration...

He is running in a xenophobic platform, in which he tells a largely uneducated
frustrated majority that all their problems derive from a few already
underpriviledged minority groups in their country, and that the correct
response is electing a tough leader that will make those minorities pay and
restore the country to imagined past glories. How on earth is a comparison to
Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy not an appropriate analogy here?

~~~
Chris2048
> I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be burned at the
> ovens' stage

This implies that there is a natural progression from holding/detailing
immigrants, to mass murder. Is that what you are saying? That it's a slippery
slope?

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

~~~
dTal
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.

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

~~~
cb18
> _/ 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!_

~~~
cr1895
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/european/comments/4htthg/til_muslim_population_in_france_is_growing_two/)

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.

~~~
chillacy
Also on the front page, 4chan in-jokes and donald trump's face. I somehow
doubt most of the posters actually live in Europe, as opposed to the typical
/pol crowd latching onto a convenient issue.

~~~
cr1895
Yeah, it makes me wonder if cb18 isn't right there among them to be so
willfully ignorant of its true nature. His posting history here suggests
sympathy to the /r/european mindset (e.g. citing infowars about crime
statistics specifically to paint black people en masse as inherently more
criminal, citing a ridiculous blog that says most advances in modern history
are only due to white people, etc.)

Also the whole 18 being a symbol of neo-nazis.

------
raldi
That stat is hard to interpret in a vacuum.

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

~~~
jsmthrowaway
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.

~~~
raldi
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.

------
compactmani
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
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".

~~~
kazinator
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.

~~~
mikeash
That's an obvious and boring conclusion, though. It's barely beyond saying
that if you roll dice, sequences with more rolls tend to have more sixes.

~~~
kazinator
Yes; unfortunately, Godwin did not commit to any numbers, like "the thread
length required for a 79% probability is 500 responses".

------
hristov
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.

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

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

------
GCA10
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.

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

------
coldtea
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.

------
ck2
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.

------
tn13
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.

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

~~~
JBReefer
That's called Godwin's Law

------
kazinator
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.

~~~
stepanhruda
Did you read the article?

> Then I excluded history subreddits

~~~
kazinator
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?

~~~
stepanhruda
Godwin's law doesn't talk about only ad hominem attacks though. It talks about
comparing someone/something to nazis, most often it'll be related to the
content the comments are on. Most of the content outside r/history is unlikely
to be originally related to WWII. I would count a random mention of nazis
under a trump article as Godwin's law.

Although, knowing reddit most of the comments are probably along the lines of
"I did nazi that coming".

Source: I spend a lot of time on reddit

------
astazangasta
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.)

------
wahsd
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.

~~~
clock_tower
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_slash
>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.

~~~
clock_tower
I don't watch trash. It's precisely ourselves that any threat will come from;
I expect that the current environment of political upheaval will only get
worse.

~~~
selimthegrim
What exactly is wrong with the current passel of immigrants to the States?

~~~
clock_tower
It's not the immigrants that I'm afraid of; it's the locals. The Scotch-Irish
are being shunted aside by the march of history; their cultural values,
especially their economic improvidence, keep them from getting into the
mainstream (read _Albion's Seed_); and they're not going to go gently into
that good night. As Christian belief declines in the Scotch-Irish parts of the
US, Nazi belief grows. (I have personally seen an aspiring pastor with a
tattoo on his arm incorporating both the cross and the swastika, who saw no
contradiction between the two.) Things are going to come to a head -- either
in fierce government repression, or in uprisings or civil war -- and I don't
want to be collateral damage when they do.

------
mikestew
⌘-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.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
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.

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

------
nxzero
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.

------
orionblastar
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law)

------
stefanix
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.

------
known
Sounds like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle)

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

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

~~~
skeletonjelly
BigQuery, it's mentioned in the linked article.

[http://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-
bigquery:reddit_co...](http://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-
bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05)

Probably this dataset which is updated periodically

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

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

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

------
Patient0
I bet you could find other words than "Nazis" for which this is also true...

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

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

~~~
mynewtb
Yes, the moderation is literally Hitler here.

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

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

~~~
minimaxir
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...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_bL0dVn3z2R-pUkWuWNr7rnVe5SVXHfm3U6ZczV3u5U/edit?usp=sharing)

    
    
       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

------
beat
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.

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

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

------
qwertyuiop924
Was anybody surprised by this?

------
brotoss
I did Nazi see that coming!

------
sandGorgon
anybody what is the exact query being used ?

------
loblollyboy
and only 65% of hn threads

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

~~~
tyenl
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.

------
Negative1
So is his extrapolation that at 4k+ it will reach towards 100%?

~~~
vernie
Right, the first line of the post.

~~~
Negative1
Downvotes for summing up the whole article into a simple concept?

~~~
minimaxir
You are likely getting downvoted because your comment is redundant.

