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2005·Early YouTube

Poe's law

Without a signal, sincere extremism and parody of it are indistinguishable.

A saying

The story

What this was

Nathan Poe's 2005 forum observation, now one of the handful of named laws the internet actually uses. It describes the exact condition of most of the modern web.

It first appeared in 2005, during early YouTube.

You were there

More from 2005

The same internet

Early YouTube

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
Nathan Poe's 2005 forum observation, now one of the handful of named laws the internet actually uses. It describes the exact condition of most of the modern web.
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