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 fallacy will simply increase the irrationality of the discussion.

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