2005·Early YouTube
Poe's law
This one never had a single recording. What is known is below.
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
Without a signal, sincere extremism and parody of it are indistinguishable.
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.
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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.




