06 November 2009

A Neatorama post may break Godwin's Law


The story itself is an instant classic. Six-year-old Elena Desserich was diagnosed with a malignancy in her brain. During the last six months of her life she began drawing love notes and hiding them in the family's house. After she died, the family began to find hundreds of these notes. The girl's story, illustrated with her notes, has now been published as a book, "Notes Left Behind."

After the story was posted, the comments began to arrive - first a trickle, then a stream, and recently a flood. As I write this analysis there are 2,742 comments on the post! To save you hours of reading, let me summarize them as follows -

a) This is a tragic, heartbreaking story that should be an inspiration to all of us.
b) This is a fake story that was created to sell the book.
c) Anyone who calls this a fake story is an insensitive, soulless zombie who should rot in Hell. The story can't be fake because the girl is real and the story was reported by ABC news.
d) Anyone who thinks stories like this are not manipulated is an internet newbie. There are suspicious "facts" in the story. If you believe what you hear on ABC, I'll have a bridge to sell you.
e) It's not bogus because all the profits of the book go to support a cancer foundation. You are a callous and godless dirtbag.
f) It's bogus, because "The Cure Starts Now" foundation was started by the family, who constitute the Board of Directors and staff the investment and business councils. You are unutteably naive.
g) I'm too busy to read previous comments, so I'll repeat comment "a"
h) I read comment "a" and my reply is a repeat of comment "b"
-zzz) Continue recycling variations of comments "a" through "f"

I'm thankful that I didn't write the post, because the procedure on Neatorama is for the author of each post to screen and weed comments for profanity, absurdity, and spam. Alex' emailbox must be smoking.

Here's what I found most interesting: I searched the page with 2700+ comments for the word "Hiter" - and it is not present! This represents a serious challenge to Godwin's Law.

Godwin's Law was defined almost 20 years ago in relation to Usenet discussions, but has subsequently been extrapolated to include discussion threads, message boards, and chat rooms. The Law basically says that as a thread/board/chat gets longer and longer, the probability that someone will invoke Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.

Godwin's Law was one of ten internet rules and laws that were summarized in a nice post at The Telegraph. As a former English major, I particularly like Skitt's Law:
Expressed as "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself" or "the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster."

It is an online version of the proofreading truism Muphry’s Law, also known as Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror".

More on these internet laws some other time.

BTW, please pretty please don't leave any comments here re the little girl with brain cancer. Those comments should properly be added on to the Neatorama thread...

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