Godwin's Law

Godwin's law, coined by Mike Godwin in 1990, states that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis approaches one. Originally an observation about Usenet, it became a widely cited piece of internet folklore, often invoked to suggest that a debate has degenerated once such a comparison appears. Godwin himself has clarified that not every Nazi comparison is invalid, only glib or reflexive ones.

The law matters to platform culture because it names a predictable failure mode of long, heated threads, the slide toward maximal accusation, that Reddit's open, escalating comment structure makes easy. It is frequently cited in moderation and meta-discussion as shorthand for an argument losing proportion, and it touches real policy questions about hate, glorification of atrocity and the line between legitimate historical analogy and rule-breaking trivialisation. As an early articulation of how online discourse decays, it remains a reference point in thinking about civility norms and thread-level moderation.