You’ve def­i­nitely heard of at least one of them and maybe even laughed, groaned or plain ignored a few oth­ers. To help along that process Tom Chivers presents ten laws of the Inter­net:

  • Godwin’s Law “As a Usenet dis­cus­sion grows longer, the prob­a­bil­ity of a com­par­i­son involv­ing Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” […] It is closely related to the log­i­cal fal­lacy reduc­tio ad Hitlerum, which says “Hitler (or the Nazis) liked X, so X is bad”.
  • Poe’s Law “With­out a wink­ing smi­ley or other bla­tant dis­play of humour, it is impos­si­ble to cre­ate a par­ody of fun­da­men­tal­ism that some­one won’t mis­take for the real thing.” inverse mean­ing, stat­ing that non-fundamentalists will often mis­take sin­cere expres­sions of fun­da­men­tal­ist beliefs for parody.
  • Rule 34 “If it exists, there is porn of it.” See also Rule 35: “If no such porn exists, it will be made.”
  • Skitt’s Law “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.”
  • Scopie’s Law “In any dis­cus­sion involv­ing sci­ence or med­i­cine, cit­ing Whale.to [a con­spir­acy the­ory site] as a cred­i­ble source loses the argu­ment imme­di­ately, and gets you laughed out of the room.”
  • Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law) “If you have to insist that you’ve won an inter­net argu­ment, you’ve prob­a­bly lost badly.”
  • Pommer’s Law “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.”
  • DeMyer’s Zeroth, First, Sec­ond and Third Laws: “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.” (Sec­ond Law)
  • Cohen’s Law “Who­ever resorts to the argu­ment that ‘who­ever resorts to the argu­ment that… has auto­mat­i­cally lost the debate’ has auto­mat­i­cally lost the debate.”
  • The Law of Excla­ma­tion “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.”