Please pay! 10 Internet Laws in Communication

In the Internet’s forerunner, Usenet, the new way of communicating from one computer to another was fascinating, but not always easy. Anonymized, it offered new forms of exchange, but also new opportunities for abuse.

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In this section, we present amazing, impressive, informative and funny figures from the fields of IT, science, art, business, politics and of course mathematics every Tuesday.

The basic features of the problems in communication have hardly changed since the emergence of the Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), whose implementation in Unix in 1978 is considered the birth of Usenet. Whether it’s a newsgroup, forum or social network: Rules were needed to ensure a form of communicative cooperation – netiquette.

The forum rules of the Heiseforum, which has guaranteed lively discussions on heise-online articles and other topics since 1999, are based on the RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines, supplemented by their own specific terms of use.

With the peculiarities of the network culture, the Usenet Laws arose, which mostly explain typical network phenomena ironically. In 2009, the British newspaper The Telegraph listed 10 of the most important internet legalities.

The 10 most important internet laws according to The Telegraph

1. Godwin’s law
The most famous of all internet laws, created by Mike Godwin in 1990. Originally it read as follows: “The longer a Usenet discussion lasts, the greater the likelihood that a comparison with Nazis or Hitler will be drawn”. Something with Hitler, although the topic has nothing to do with it – this is mostly more of a problem for English-speaking networks, but is also sometimes used in Germany to escalate a discussion.

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2. Poe’s law
“Without a tongue-in-cheek smiley face or some other overt display of humor, it’s impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t believe is genuine.”
Origin is a user named Nathan Poe, who commented on creationism during a debate on an American fundamentalist Christian website in 2005. In Germany, the rule is mostly experienced when, for example, stories from the satirical website Der Postillon are believed to be true by mostly angry users in social networks.

3. Rules 34 and 35
“If they exist, there will be porn of them”. Rule 35 also applies: “If there is no such porn, it will be made.” The rules state that there can be porn for everything that exists. They probably originated with erotic depictions of cartoon characters like the Simpsons.

4. Skitt’s law
Any post that corrects an error in another post contains at least one error itself, or “the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it causes the poster”. The classic of an online battle of words: You correct spelling mistakes of the previous comment with relish, the writer then finds the error of the correction – the hamster wheel is already turning.

The troll: The figure that sometimes causes amusement and sometimes despair in communities like the heise forum.

(Image: heise online)

5. Scopie’s law
In a discussion about science or medicine, if you cite a page full of conspiracy theories as a credible source, you lose the discussion immediately. In this country it could be observed in the Corona discussion: Questionable pages full of fake news and amateur scientists in their telegram groups as the origin of their theses often caused incomprehension and amusement.

6. Danth’s Law
Anyone who vigorously declares himself the winner is usually wrong and has lost. Prematurely declaring oneself the winner is often used when one runs out of arguments or when the other person comes up with more plausible theses.

7. The Pomeranian Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this law states: “A person’s opinion can be changed by reading information on the Internet. The nature of that change is by having no opinion or by having a wrong opinion.”

8. DeMyers Act
Named after Ken DeMyer, a moderator on Conservapedia.com It states, “Anyone who posts a discussion that consists largely of quotations can safely be ignored and presumed to have lost the discussion before it even started.”

9. Cohen’s law
“Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that… …automatically lost the debate’ automatically lost the debate.”
The longer version of the law proposed by Brian Cohen in 2007 is well known to heiseforum users:
“Anyone who resorts to the argument that
‘whoever resorts to the argument that…
‘whoever resorts to the argument that…
‘Whoever resorts to the argument that…
‘whoever relies on the argument that…
‘whoever relies on the argument that…
…automatically lost the debate’
…automatically lost the debate’
…automatically lost the debate’
…automatically lost the debate’
… automatically lost the debate.”
Both laws can mercilessly water down the discussion through excessive citing.

10. The Law of Exclamation
This law was first mentioned in an article by Lori Robertson on FactCheck.org in 2008, stating: “The more exclamation marks are used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is an outright lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters”. Heiseforum users know the flood of exclamation marks under !!11elf. Excessively large numbers of capital letters in a tweet or comment is now also seen as shouting in net culture. Lots of teardrop smileys have a similarly negative effect as a mass of punctuation marks.

It wouldn’t be Usenet if there weren’t other laws: the Bruhaha website lists about 70 laws.

Although the laws have their origins in the Usenet era, they basically describe many current problems and are still elements of net culture for more than a decade. This is probably because they describe human weaknesses, which hardly changed with the development of the Internet. The web is changing at breathtaking speed – the web society cannot keep up with the pace.

(beautiful)

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