7 ms·

Eternal September

95 points by bmmayer1 4y ago

rr888 4y ago
There must be some clever meta-level phrase to describe the few times every year when someone learns about "Eternal September" and posts this link.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  E^2S?
- AyyWS 4y ago
  One of the lucky 10,000 https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- nealabq 4y ago
  EESS: Eternal "Eternal September" September? Or, to enable infix-nesting, (Eternal (Eternal September) September). On HN, self-referential irony abides. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781040
- Li7h 4y ago
  Eternity is a long time
- MrStonedOne 4y ago
mjb 4y ago
It's fascinating to think about what the internet may have looked like if the early internet adopters had thought about how to welcome and help people, rather than engaging in salty gatekeeping. Specifically, thought about how to scale communities and discussions, rather than leaving those problems up to companies and service providers (and, then, being even more salty that those companies came to dominate the space).
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > if the early internet adopters had thought about how to welcome and help people, rather than engaging in salty gatekeeping. But they did actually welcome and help people. The earliest ISPs were exactly that: attempts to welcome and help people to join the internet. Eternal September is more a function of the number of people in a particular community not about whether or not people help other newcomers to join. The difference is that the early folks came from the tech world and had a level of involvement that was entirely different from the one that the later joiners had and so we ended up with a significantly dumbed down and re-siloed internet. The creator:consumer ratio is what dropped.
  - jghn 4y ago
    Yes. And there was also an impact that instead of an influx of new people on a regular cadence it was never ending. People were used to a brief disruption of netiquette standards and then things would go back to normal. But once the gates opened it was a never ending, yet increasing, set of new people arriving every day. It didn't take long for the new folks to outnumber the old hands. To your creator:consumer point, that is also true. And I also think part of it was that the existing crowd couldn't comprehend that this was the case. People on Usenet at the time tended toward certain personality types. It was a bit of a shock when the average poster started to have wildly different goals and expectations.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    > The earliest ISPs were exactly that: attempts to welcome and help people to join the internet. As a (mostly former) member of some old communities: it were just the same in the all cases, a small group of visionaries (or just a bunch of folks high on enthusiasm) which are slowly deluted by innate bureucrats and the grind of describing the same things over and over to the people who can't see the bright red "FAQ: NEWCOMERS PLEASE READ!" right in their faces.
- Comevius 4y ago
  I would argue that the early adopters were inconsequential. They were too few in numbers to affect anything. The internet created a culture on it's own, one that continues to be a challenge to integrate into society, because human nature weren't designed for it. It's a new environment, and our information processing capabilities and peculiarities lack the adaptation for it. The internet is a bold experiment.
sadjad 4y ago
This brings a whole new meaning to "Wake Me Up When September Ends."
- excalibur 4y ago
  I don't know if I would say new, Eternal September had already been in progress for 11½ years when the Green Day song was released.
  - codetrotter 4y ago
    Seems that the song was unrelated to Eternal September. > "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was written by frontman Billie Joe Armstrong about his father, who died from esophageal cancer in September 1982 when Armstrong was 10 years old. Armstrong, at one point, dubbed the song the most autobiographical he had written to that point, considering it "therapeutic" but also difficult to perform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Me_Up_When_September_Ends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Me_Up_When_September_Ends
anamexis 4y ago
Somewhat off-topic, but what's up with the date widget in the top right? It has today's date, and then "September 10517, 1993"
- seritools 4y ago
  See the "Legacy" part in that article.
  - anamexis 4y ago
    Ha! Totally missed that. Awesome.
thereddaikon 4y ago
The state of the modern internet and social has me rethinking the common wisdom that giving everyone as much access to computing as possible is a good idea. I think lowering the bar, to a certain point, has been harmful to society. Its a case of tragedy of the commons. It takes no effort to get online and speak your mind so nobody respects the technology. They don't have to, they didn't earn it. It was given to them. If people had to expend even a little bit of effort to access social media I think they would treat it very differently. And I don't think you have to raise that bar by much at all.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Of course, pre-Eternal September, you only got to access the Internet if you went to the right schools or worked for the right companies or government organizations. Which in certain ways was certainly better for the haves but also makes for some pretty heavy-duty gatekeeping.
- night-rider 4y ago
  Yes but you can’t deny that giving everyone a level playing field is a net positive. There will be problems with that like hate speech, trolling, harassment etc but that can be addressed with safety measures and moderation, which social networks employ although they don’t stomp out everything and anonymous accounts are still a problem.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Yes but you can’t deny that giving everyone a level playing field is a net positive. Sure I can. Giving millions of random uneducated whackjobs an equal voice with actual trained medical professionals poses a real threat to public health. That's exactly what's happened.
- bragr 4y ago
  So everything else that the internet offers is worthless because you can't have a particular subjective experience in the past? People can't benefit from computers because you don't approve? Everytime this particular subject comes up, commenters are quick to chime with their experiences or actual messages, and I don't think the quality of the posts was as good on average as you think. Usenet had weirdos, trolls, crazy people, political nutjobs, racists, and plenty of inane posts too. I think you're nostalgic for something that never existed.
ghaff 4y ago
I had always associated the Eternal September specifically with AOL. However, the Wikipedia article seems to be accurate as far as I can tell from referenced sources--even if some other sources conflate AOL offering Usenet access beginning in, apparently, March 1994 with the September 1993 Eternal September date. It's probably the case that access was starting to significantly widen c. mid-1993 and the expansion to AOL early the next year amplified the trend.
lubesGordi 4y ago
I remember a friend telling me about this forum called 'Digg' back in 2006 or so. 'A bunch of cool libertarians' is how he described it. I discovered reddit a couple years after that and would've described it the same way. Times change.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I think that The Eternal September was the worst thing to happen to The Internet. I think that The Eternal September was the best thing to happen to The Internet. It was when all those "tourists," in loud shirts, and straw hats, started wandering around, talking loudly, and throwing trash on the ground. It was also when they brought money with them. Lots of money.
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
This effect was noticable a bit in the PCVR community after Oculus Quest 2 went mainstream (at least in comparison to previous gen VR equipment) and a lot of titles needed to be graphically down sampled to run all in one on the headset. For instance, VRChat had high def rooms and low res rooms just for Quest users. Some mix of an earned tech superiority complex with a mild resentful envy of how easy everything was for the newbies. Funny how these things can repeat with new ingredients.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  I distinctively remember a massive influx of children in PokerStars VR in December 2020/January 2021. A lot of kids must have gotten a Quest 2 for Christmas. But more to your point, yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about the existence of the Quest 2. On one hand, it brings the price of VR way down which potentially increases adoption, but on the other hand, the lack of GPU power means graphics are dumbed down, and the tracking on its controllers isn't as good as PCVR, so I worry it could also lead to its downfall as the experience is sub-par.

95 points by bmmayer1 4y ago

There must be some clever meta-level phrase to describe the few times every year when someone learns about "Eternal September" and posts this link.

jacquesm 4y ago
E^2S?
AyyWS 4y ago
One of the lucky 10,000 https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
nealabq 4y ago
EESS: Eternal "Eternal September" September? Or, to enable infix-nesting, (Eternal (Eternal September) September). On HN, self-referential irony abides. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781040
Li7h 4y ago
Eternity is a long time
MrStonedOne 4y ago

mjb 4y ago

It's fascinating to think about what the internet may have looked like if the early internet adopters had thought about how to welcome and help people, rather than engaging in salty gatekeeping. Specifically, thought about how to scale communities and discussions, rather than leaving those problems up to companies and service providers (and, then, being even more salty that those companies came to dominate the space).

jacquesm 4y ago
> if the early internet adopters had thought about how to welcome and help people, rather than engaging in salty gatekeeping. But they did actually welcome and help people. The earliest ISPs were exactly that: attempts to welcome and help people to join the internet. Eternal September is more a function of the number of people in a particular community not about whether or not people help other newcomers to join. The difference is that the early folks came from the tech world and had a level of involvement that was entirely different from the one that the later joiners had and so we ended up with a significantly dumbed down and re-siloed internet. The creator:consumer ratio is what dropped.
- jghn 4y ago
  Yes. And there was also an impact that instead of an influx of new people on a regular cadence it was never ending. People were used to a brief disruption of netiquette standards and then things would go back to normal. But once the gates opened it was a never ending, yet increasing, set of new people arriving every day. It didn't take long for the new folks to outnumber the old hands. To your creator:consumer point, that is also true. And I also think part of it was that the existing crowd couldn't comprehend that this was the case. People on Usenet at the time tended toward certain personality types. It was a bit of a shock when the average poster started to have wildly different goals and expectations.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > The earliest ISPs were exactly that: attempts to welcome and help people to join the internet. As a (mostly former) member of some old communities: it were just the same in the all cases, a small group of visionaries (or just a bunch of folks high on enthusiasm) which are slowly deluted by innate bureucrats and the grind of describing the same things over and over to the people who can't see the bright red "FAQ: NEWCOMERS PLEASE READ!" right in their faces.
Comevius 4y ago
I would argue that the early adopters were inconsequential. They were too few in numbers to affect anything. The internet created a culture on it's own, one that continues to be a challenge to integrate into society, because human nature weren't designed for it. It's a new environment, and our information processing capabilities and peculiarities lack the adaptation for it. The internet is a bold experiment.

sadjad 4y ago

This brings a whole new meaning to "Wake Me Up When September Ends."

excalibur 4y ago
I don't know if I would say new, Eternal September had already been in progress for 11½ years when the Green Day song was released.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  Seems that the song was unrelated to Eternal September. > "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was written by frontman Billie Joe Armstrong about his father, who died from esophageal cancer in September 1982 when Armstrong was 10 years old. Armstrong, at one point, dubbed the song the most autobiographical he had written to that point, considering it "therapeutic" but also difficult to perform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Me_Up_When_September_Ends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Me_Up_When_September_Ends

anamexis 4y ago

Somewhat off-topic, but what's up with the date widget in the top right? It has today's date, and then "September 10517, 1993"

seritools 4y ago
See the "Legacy" part in that article.
- anamexis 4y ago
  Ha! Totally missed that. Awesome.

thereddaikon 4y ago

The state of the modern internet and social has me rethinking the common wisdom that giving everyone as much access to computing as possible is a good idea. I think lowering the bar, to a certain point, has been harmful to society. Its a case of tragedy of the commons. It takes no effort to get online and speak your mind so nobody respects the technology. They don't have to, they didn't earn it. It was given to them. If people had to expend even a little bit of effort to access social media I think they would treat it very differently. And I don't think you have to raise that bar by much at all.

ghaff 4y ago
Of course, pre-Eternal September, you only got to access the Internet if you went to the right schools or worked for the right companies or government organizations. Which in certain ways was certainly better for the haves but also makes for some pretty heavy-duty gatekeeping.
night-rider 4y ago
Yes but you can’t deny that giving everyone a level playing field is a net positive. There will be problems with that like hate speech, trolling, harassment etc but that can be addressed with safety measures and moderation, which social networks employ although they don’t stomp out everything and anonymous accounts are still a problem.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Yes but you can’t deny that giving everyone a level playing field is a net positive. Sure I can. Giving millions of random uneducated whackjobs an equal voice with actual trained medical professionals poses a real threat to public health. That's exactly what's happened.
bragr 4y ago
So everything else that the internet offers is worthless because you can't have a particular subjective experience in the past? People can't benefit from computers because you don't approve? Everytime this particular subject comes up, commenters are quick to chime with their experiences or actual messages, and I don't think the quality of the posts was as good on average as you think. Usenet had weirdos, trolls, crazy people, political nutjobs, racists, and plenty of inane posts too. I think you're nostalgic for something that never existed.

ghaff 4y ago

I had always associated the Eternal September specifically with AOL. However, the Wikipedia article seems to be accurate as far as I can tell from referenced sources--even if some other sources conflate AOL offering Usenet access beginning in, apparently, March 1994 with the September 1993 Eternal September date. It's probably the case that access was starting to significantly widen c. mid-1993 and the expansion to AOL early the next year amplified the trend.

lubesGordi 4y ago

I remember a friend telling me about this forum called 'Digg' back in 2006 or so. 'A bunch of cool libertarians' is how he described it. I discovered reddit a couple years after that and would've described it the same way. Times change.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I think that The Eternal September was the worst thing to happen to The Internet. I think that The Eternal September was the best thing to happen to The Internet. It was when all those "tourists," in loud shirts, and straw hats, started wandering around, talking loudly, and throwing trash on the ground. It was also when they brought money with them. Lots of money.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago

This effect was noticable a bit in the PCVR community after Oculus Quest 2 went mainstream (at least in comparison to previous gen VR equipment) and a lot of titles needed to be graphically down sampled to run all in one on the headset. For instance, VRChat had high def rooms and low res rooms just for Quest users. Some mix of an earned tech superiority complex with a mild resentful envy of how easy everything was for the newbies. Funny how these things can repeat with new ingredients.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
I distinctively remember a massive influx of children in PokerStars VR in December 2020/January 2021. A lot of kids must have gotten a Quest 2 for Christmas. But more to your point, yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about the existence of the Quest 2. On one hand, it brings the price of VR way down which potentially increases adoption, but on the other hand, the lack of GPU power means graphics are dumbed down, and the tracking on its controllers isn't as good as PCVR, so I worry it could also lead to its downfall as the experience is sub-par.