Re:78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis
by stepanhruda on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @02:21PM
(#11630445)
Did you read the article?
> Then I excluded history subreddits
Re:78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis
by kazinator on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @02:23PM
(#11630463)
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?
Re:78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis
by stepanhruda on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @05:10PM
(#11631840)
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
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.