Wilcox-McCandlish law

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The Wilcox-McCandlish Law of Online Discourse Evolution, developed by Bryce Wilcox and ca. 1996, is:

The chance of success of any attempt to change the topic or direction of a thread of discussion in a networked forum is directly proportional to the quality of the current content.

There are numerous corollaries:

• McCandlish's First Corollary

The chance of any change to the topic or direction of a thread being a change for the better is inversely proportional to the quality of the content before the change.

* The Exception to McCandlish's First Corollary

: When a thread reaches the flame war stage, all changes in thread topic or direction will be changes for the worse.

Wilcox's Corollary

The more involved one is in a flame war, the less likely one is to recognize it as such.

McCandlish's Second Corollary

Thread bandwidth consumption increases in inverse proportion to thread content quality.

McCandlish's Third Corollary

Any attempt at recourse to formal logic or identification of classic fallacies will simply increase the irrationality of the discussion.

* The Sub-corollary to McCandlish's Third

: It is likely that this is so because the use of formal logic immediately raises the quality of the discussion to unity, thus guaranteeing the next followup will be a non sequitur.

McCandlish's Foil to Reed & Metcalfe

The utility of large online forums scales multiplicatively downward with the number of partcipants.

The Wilcox-McCandlish Paradox

Thread degeneration can (theoretically) be forestalled or even reversed by citation to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law.

History

The Wilcox-McCandlish Law came about in a wry e-mail discussion over a period of several days, some time around 1995-6. Agreeing that online discussions seemed unusually prone to flaming and inexplicably difficult to keep on-topic, the authors began formulating a "law" that would at least comment on these phenomena if not explain their origins. Inspired by Godwin's Law, but noting that the effects at issue were not limited to the specific topics covered by G.L. and its corollaries, they attempted to "codify" something more generally applicable, make it humorous, and also require it to be thought through carefully to be understood. The first few attempts eventually became corollaries, because they were not high-level or pithy enough. The third or fourth attempt was the one settled upon. The Law, Wilcox's Corollary, McCandlish's 1st through 3rd Corollaries, Exception to McC.'s 1st, and the Paradox all date to the same week. The Sub-corollary to McC.'s 3rd dates to 2005, and was anonymously authored. McC.'s Foil was created on March 10, 2006, in light mockery of Reed's Law and Metcalfe's Law, which do not take into account the downsides of network overgrowth in some contexts.

The W.-McC. Law is sometimes referred to as the "Wilcox-McCandlish Law of Online Discourse Devolution", which co-author McCandlish finds to be "maybe more apt"; but the original, ironic name is more prevalent. It can also simply be called the "Law of Online Discourse Evolution".

See also

• Godwin's law
• Benford's law of controversy
• Internet troll
• Flame war
• List of eponymous laws
• List of adages named after people
• List of observations named after people

External links and references

• http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/wilcox-mccandlish.law

 

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