Alright folks, today I’m spilling the beans on something I messed around with recently: “mike godwin.” You know, Godwin’s Law and all that jazz.
So, first things first, I got curious. I started by just hitting up the search engines, seeing what the general consensus was on Godwin’s Law. For those who aren’t in the know, it basically says that the longer an online discussion goes on, the higher the probability of someone eventually making a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis.
Next, I thought, “Okay, how can I actually use this? What can I do with it?” I didn’t want to just read about it; I wanted to play with it.
Then, it hit me: a comment section crawler! I figured I could whip up a little script to scrape comments from a forum, blog, or even YouTube, and then analyze them for any mentions of Hitler, Nazis, or anything similar. It seemed like a fun way to see Godwin’s Law in action.
I went with Python, naturally. Started by installing `BeautifulSoup4` and `requests`. That’s my go-to combo for web scraping. I found a small, relatively active forum and started writing the code to grab all the comments. That part was pretty straightforward. Inspect the page, find the HTML elements containing the comments, and then loop through them, extracting the text.
The real challenge was identifying the “Godwin” references. I needed a way to reliably detect when someone was bringing up Hitler or the Nazis. I built a list of keywords, including “Hitler,” “Nazi,” “Nazism,” “Third Reich,” and even some less obvious terms. I also included some common phrases like “literally Hitler.”
Then, I ran my script. It scraped all the comments, went through them, and flagged any that contained my keywords. The results were… interesting. Some were clear-cut Godwin’s Law examples, but others were more ambiguous. Some people were just discussing historical events, not necessarily trying to derail the conversation with inflammatory comparisons.
To improve accuracy, I added some context analysis. I tried to look at the surrounding sentences to see if the Hitler/Nazi reference was being used in a comparative way. This was a bit trickier, but I managed to get some decent results.
After refining the script, I started running it on different forums and blogs. I even tried it on some YouTube comment sections. It was actually quite eye-opening to see how often Godwin’s Law comes into play in online discussions. It’s like, give people enough time, and someone will always go there.
In the end, I didn’t discover anything earth-shattering. But I did get a hands-on feel for Godwin’s Law, and I got to practice my web scraping and text analysis skills. Plus, it was kind of fun to see how predictable people can be online. I reckon I might turn it into a little web app someday, who knows!
So, that’s my “mike godwin” adventure. It wasn’t about changing the world, but it was about getting my hands dirty and learning something new. And that’s always a win in my book.
