4 in 5 most popular threads on Reddit invoke Nazis or Hitler

It's a symptom of internet comments almost as old as the World Wide Web itself.

In 1990, a lawyer named Mike Godwin noticed a peculiar habit cropping up in Usenet forums. If people didn't like something, they'd juxtapose it with Hitler.

Years later, Godwin told New York Magazine that he wanted to "prevent the Holocaust from turning into a cliche, or into a handy arrow in someone's rhetorical quiver."

So the lawyer came up with a rule-of-thumb that now bears his name: Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, which embedded itself in the fabric of the internet after he explained his idea in a popular 1994 Wired magazine article.

"As an online discussion grows longer," he wrote, "the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

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Sixteen years after Godwin's Law, a business intelligence analyst and blogger who goes by the pseudonym CuriousGnu decided to see just how frequently people invoke Hitler.

Using a public dataset of 4.6 million comments from the social media forums on Reddit, CuriousGnu was able to discern the rate at which people invoke the mustachioed fascist or Nazis.

The analyst recently shared the findings on his or her blog.

CuriousGnu found that the longer a comment thread continued, the greater the chances someone mentioned Nazis or Hitler.

If a thread went beyond 1,000 comments, nearly four in five -- 78 percent -- had such a reference.

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CuriousGnu wrote in an email to The Washington Post that the goal wasn't to finally prove or disprove Godwin's Law, which would require assessing the context of the comment.

The analyst simply wanted to measure the sheer volume of Nazi references.

That took a little refinement: The sections of Reddit that deal with history, CuriousGnu wrote, mention "Hitler and Nazis many times, which of course doesn't have anything to do with their form of online social interaction but with the topics they are discussing."

Of course, you could argue that the longer a comment thread continues, all things being equal, the chances of any given word appearing also increases. (As the infinite monkey theorem goes, given enough chimps and typewriters, one ape is bound to produce the works of Shakespeare.)

But there seems to be some particular appeal to the invocation of Hitler. When asked by New York Magazine if he thought his law still held true in 2013, Godwin replied the only thing he would change is that Hitler references aren't confined to the web.