Rule 37: There are no girls on the internet. Rule 35: The exception to rule #34 is the citation of rule #34.
While the rules vary quite a bit across online subcultures, a few have become well established, including a number of holdovers from the original Encyclopedia Dramatica: Some later versions have only 48 entries, whereas others have 100. The original list claimed, for instance, to have 50 rules, but actually only had 18. There’s no one, consistent, agreed-upon set of rules of the internet. The founder of 4chan, Christopher Poole, has said that the rules became so popular that users tended to ignore 4chan’s rules in favor of their own homemade rules of the internet. Many of the catchphrases within the rules of the internet, as it exists today, are specific allusions to memes on 4chan or popular references to Fight Club, South Park, and so on.Įmerging as a kind of Netiquette for the Internet group Anonymous, the rules of the internet were published on the satirical wiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica, in 2006, before an attempt at a more official list emerged on 4chan in 2007. Rather, they are a series of in-jokes, guidelines, and references related to internet culture as it was in the early 2000s. Contrary to what the name may imply, the so-called rules of the internet are not laws enforceable by any official authority.
