The Wilcox-McCandlish law of online discourse evolution, developed by Bryce Wilcox and Stanton McCandlish on USENET, is

The chance of success of any attempt to change the topic or direction of a thread of discussion in a networked forum is directly proportional to the quality of the current content.

There are numerous corollaries:

McCandlish's first corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish law:

The chance of any change to the topic or direction of a thread being a change for the better is inversely proportional to the quality of the content before the change.

The exception to McCandlish's first corollary:

When a thread reaches the flame war stage, all changes in thread topic or direction will be changes for the worse.

McCandlish's second corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish law:

Thread bandwidth consumption increases in inverse proportion to thread content quality.

Wilcox's corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish law:

The more involved one is in a flame war, the less likely one is to recognize it as such.

McCandlish's third corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish law:

Any attempt at recourse to formal logic or identification of classic fallacies will simply increase the irrationality of the discussion.

The Wilcox-McCandlish paradox:

Thread degeneration can (theoretically) be forestalled or even reversed by citation to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law.

See also: Godwin's law

External links and references

• http://www.eff.org/Net_culture/Folklore/Humor/wilcox-mccandlish.law