Internet rules and laws

Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe:

Any internet user will know that the web, like the outside world (or “meatspace”), follows certain rules.

We take a look at 10, with the most well-known and widely used towards the top and some of the lesser lights lower down. If you know any more, let us know below.

Here are the rules in short:

1. As an internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches certainty.
2. Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.
3. If it exists, there is porn of it.
4. "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.
5. In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.
6. If you have to insist that you’ve won an internet argument, you’ve probably lost badly.
7. A person’s mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.
8. Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.
9. Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that… …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.
10. The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters.
    

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