4 ms·

No More Eternal Septembers (2020)

15 points by ecliptik 4y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
I always thought "Eternal September" referred to the beginning of the (most common) university academic year in the US when incoming freshmen received their UNIX accounts, including access to Usenet. I was one of those students. The Jargon File seems to corroborate this meaning. The OP completely ignores the academic side of the internet, which is where the internet came from, focusing solely on "AOL", a commercial venture. https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ende...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  it does mean that.
- jakewins 4y ago
  It’s both right? The “September” part is the new freshmen thing, but the “eternal” part was the AOL thing. Like, after AOL, being on usenet was like eternally being on usenet in September.
- bigiain 4y ago
  Sort of. Usenet was used to the influx of new University student accounts that joined in every September without understanding the norms or culture of the usenet groups they started posting to, and it took some time for them to learn the expected way to behave. But things "went back to normal" until the next September with it's new batch of uni students with internet access started showing up in usenet. As the second half of that jargon file entry goes on to say, when AOL users started showing up, it became the "eternal September", since there was a continual deluge of new usenet users without any respite where they'd learned to fit in with the culture. At least that's my memories from being a regular on comp.lang.perl.misc, aus.motorcycles and the scary devil monastery back then.
flenserboy 4y ago
The Internet before the Eternal September began is worth knowing about, even worth mourning. The difference was not one of tech vs. non-technical, or of utopian vs. practical, or whatever rhetorical characterization of things best helps this author's aims. The difference was that it felt like a community one could come to know, even if and when there were strong philosophical differences between people. The influx of people made this sense of being a part of a group of real people impossible. Scale affects things. This article misses what really happened, and tries to read what happened then through a specific, contemporary political lens — its conclusions are predictable from early on in the article, and roll out just as predicted. Those who whine about gatekeeping are generally seeking to become gatekeepers themselves; this article is not excepted from this rule. The real problem of the Eternal September is not the noobs; the problem is that the legitimate demands of non-technical people to be able to have online access has led to the removal/deep hiding of the communication tools more technical users were building and expected to be able to use (perhaps we could call it the iOSification of everything). Example One: Google's dumbing-down of search, making it partially useful for casual users, and anti-useful for those who want to be specific, targeted, and deep in their searches. A tiered-level internet (accessible to all, but not built for the LCD) would be far preferable to what we have right now, and would help to build actual communities.
- parker_mountain 4y ago
  IRC has seen a gentle resurgence, as had the fediverse, largely because the friction (and basic knowledge) required to get on and participate is too high of a bar for a significant percentage of the population.
zwkrt 4y ago
I don't really know how to solve the eternal september problem on any given online forum except to create a separate space for new users to talk about noob things, and to heavily discourage noob discussions on the other/main forum. It's a hard problem to solve, but experienced members will eventually become burned out from continually answering the same basic questions over and over again. HN isn't immune to this problem, but I think it helps that HN is heavily biased against self posts. Still here I see an increase in meme comments over time. My best guess is that the UI and subject matter is just too dry for the hoi poloi to be interested.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
There is an interesting balance to be struck when organizing social spaces. Social spaces having a shared culture is important, and is trivial in the beginning: chances are whatever group formed the space in the first place shared some common ground. From there, in the early stages of growth, the space has a sufficient momentum that the gradual influx of users adapt to the culture, and the culture adapts to the user, and the culture endures. That process breaks down, however, when the influx of new members begins to outpace the normalization between the new members and existing members, accelerating until the desirability of being in the space is eroded, typically due to the very breakdown of the culture of the space. But not allowing new users at all is not an acceptable state of affairs, because that leads to its own problems: one, it guarantees the demise of the space, because people can always leave, but are never replaced, and two, it leads to a radicalization of the group, as fringe elements of the group have a tendency to drive out existing members, leaving only the radicals (note, I mean radical relative to the selective pressure of the space, as most spaces are radical in their own way relative to society at large). Maintaining this balance is thus rooted in 1) streamlining the normalization between the cultures of the space and of new users and 2) limiting the rate of new members. Different spaces go about controlling those factors in different ways: fraternities at universities are a good example: they accept a limited number of members a year, and have a formalized initiation process to become an accepted member of the space. Fraternal orders, like the Masons, the Oddfellows, the Elks and the ilk are a poor example: they over corrected on limiting new membership, until they the damaged the desirability of being in their space until they couldn't recruit anymore. Online, this problem is even harder, as there really aren't any natural limits like there are in life. That means all control factors must be artificial, which becomes contentious.
kerkeslager 4y ago
Reading this is like watching someone desecrate the grave of someone I cared about. The writer is very, very wrong about the facts, and should delete this post. Right from the beginning: > For decades, internet culture has struggled with the n00bs. For generations, as new people entered the digital gates, there was an inevitable sneer that awaited them as they hit the onramp. The struggle with the n00bs wasn't that we were sneering at them for being n00bs. The struggle was that n00bs were assholes. It wasn't their fault: they had never interacted with other people purely over text, and while they intellectually knew there were people on the other end of the line, they didn't viscerally feel that. Since they couldn't see people's reactions and feeling hurt, n00bs would say hurtful things to people online that they would never say to people in person. Again, it's not their fault. Everyone was a n00b once, and most people remember the experience of saying something to someone, and only realizing later that you're being an asshole. I certainly did it. But this had real consequences. People committed suicide due to what people said online. The saying was, "If you die on the internet, you die in real life." So when n00bs came online, we recognized that it was important that those n00bs learn to be kind, or be kicked out. This wasn't an elitist sneer at newcomers, it was telling people, "Hey, you can't be an asshole here just because you can't see the person you're talking to." There was never a sense of superiority or gatekeeping that I remember: it was always coming from a place of, "Hey I made this mistake too, but you can't keep making it". This happened yearly, each September, due to the influx of students accessing the internet for the first time through their college's computers. So each year, we had to teach people how to behave kindly online. And it worked. By August of the next year, these communities were truly kind and friendly spaces. Spaces which are extremely difficult to find online now. And again, this wasn't about gatekeeping. Part of the beauty of these spaces was that anyone could join, and the pace of people joining wasn't being enforced--it just organically happened to be slow enough that those people could be educated and integrated. "Eternal September" occurred when AOL opened the floodgates to a steady, unrelenting stream of n00bs. There were upsides to this which I don't want to downplay, but for the communities which existed before this, it was an immediate and total annihilation. No longer could the experienced users teach the n00bs how to be kind online. There were simply too many n00bs, constantly. Eternal September IS ongoing. There are still more n00bs coming online and being assholes to each other because they don't recognize that there's another person on the other end of the line. People are still committing suicide due to what people say to them online. And in addition to the n00bs, there's now a vast backlog of experienced users who have never learned to not be assholes online. The internet is generally not a kind place. And it's honestly pretty fucked up that some people will remember our internet history this way. "You can't be an asshole here" isn't a sneer on the onramp. It's not the same as gatekeeping. In fact, being mean to n00bs or gatekeeping are directly antithetical to what we were trying to do back then.

15 points by ecliptik 4y ago

I always thought "Eternal September" referred to the beginning of the (most common) university academic year in the US when incoming freshmen received their UNIX accounts, including access to Usenet. I was one of those students. The Jargon File seems to corroborate this meaning. The OP completely ignores the academic side of the internet, which is where the internet came from, focusing solely on "AOL", a commercial venture. https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ende...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hprotagonist 4y ago
it does mean that.
jakewins 4y ago
It’s both right? The “September” part is the new freshmen thing, but the “eternal” part was the AOL thing. Like, after AOL, being on usenet was like eternally being on usenet in September.
bigiain 4y ago
Sort of. Usenet was used to the influx of new University student accounts that joined in every September without understanding the norms or culture of the usenet groups they started posting to, and it took some time for them to learn the expected way to behave. But things "went back to normal" until the next September with it's new batch of uni students with internet access started showing up in usenet. As the second half of that jargon file entry goes on to say, when AOL users started showing up, it became the "eternal September", since there was a continual deluge of new usenet users without any respite where they'd learned to fit in with the culture. At least that's my memories from being a regular on comp.lang.perl.misc, aus.motorcycles and the scary devil monastery back then.

flenserboy 4y ago

The Internet before the Eternal September began is worth knowing about, even worth mourning. The difference was not one of tech vs. non-technical, or of utopian vs. practical, or whatever rhetorical characterization of things best helps this author's aims. The difference was that it felt like a community one could come to know, even if and when there were strong philosophical differences between people. The influx of people made this sense of being a part of a group of real people impossible. Scale affects things. This article misses what really happened, and tries to read what happened then through a specific, contemporary political lens — its conclusions are predictable from early on in the article, and roll out just as predicted. Those who whine about gatekeeping are generally seeking to become gatekeepers themselves; this article is not excepted from this rule. The real problem of the Eternal September is not the noobs; the problem is that the legitimate demands of non-technical people to be able to have online access has led to the removal/deep hiding of the communication tools more technical users were building and expected to be able to use (perhaps we could call it the iOSification of everything). Example One: Google's dumbing-down of search, making it partially useful for casual users, and anti-useful for those who want to be specific, targeted, and deep in their searches. A tiered-level internet (accessible to all, but not built for the LCD) would be far preferable to what we have right now, and would help to build actual communities.

parker_mountain 4y ago
IRC has seen a gentle resurgence, as had the fediverse, largely because the friction (and basic knowledge) required to get on and participate is too high of a bar for a significant percentage of the population.

zwkrt 4y ago

I don't really know how to solve the eternal september problem on any given online forum except to create a separate space for new users to talk about noob things, and to heavily discourage noob discussions on the other/main forum. It's a hard problem to solve, but experienced members will eventually become burned out from continually answering the same basic questions over and over again. HN isn't immune to this problem, but I think it helps that HN is heavily biased against self posts. Still here I see an increase in meme comments over time. My best guess is that the UI and subject matter is just too dry for the hoi poloi to be interested.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

There is an interesting balance to be struck when organizing social spaces. Social spaces having a shared culture is important, and is trivial in the beginning: chances are whatever group formed the space in the first place shared some common ground. From there, in the early stages of growth, the space has a sufficient momentum that the gradual influx of users adapt to the culture, and the culture adapts to the user, and the culture endures. That process breaks down, however, when the influx of new members begins to outpace the normalization between the new members and existing members, accelerating until the desirability of being in the space is eroded, typically due to the very breakdown of the culture of the space. But not allowing new users at all is not an acceptable state of affairs, because that leads to its own problems: one, it guarantees the demise of the space, because people can always leave, but are never replaced, and two, it leads to a radicalization of the group, as fringe elements of the group have a tendency to drive out existing members, leaving only the radicals (note, I mean radical relative to the selective pressure of the space, as most spaces are radical in their own way relative to society at large). Maintaining this balance is thus rooted in 1) streamlining the normalization between the cultures of the space and of new users and 2) limiting the rate of new members. Different spaces go about controlling those factors in different ways: fraternities at universities are a good example: they accept a limited number of members a year, and have a formalized initiation process to become an accepted member of the space. Fraternal orders, like the Masons, the Oddfellows, the Elks and the ilk are a poor example: they over corrected on limiting new membership, until they the damaged the desirability of being in their space until they couldn't recruit anymore. Online, this problem is even harder, as there really aren't any natural limits like there are in life. That means all control factors must be artificial, which becomes contentious.

kerkeslager 4y ago

Reading this is like watching someone desecrate the grave of someone I cared about. The writer is very, very wrong about the facts, and should delete this post. Right from the beginning: > For decades, internet culture has struggled with the n00bs. For generations, as new people entered the digital gates, there was an inevitable sneer that awaited them as they hit the onramp. The struggle with the n00bs wasn't that we were sneering at them for being n00bs. The struggle was that n00bs were assholes. It wasn't their fault: they had never interacted with other people purely over text, and while they intellectually knew there were people on the other end of the line, they didn't viscerally feel that. Since they couldn't see people's reactions and feeling hurt, n00bs would say hurtful things to people online that they would never say to people in person. Again, it's not their fault. Everyone was a n00b once, and most people remember the experience of saying something to someone, and only realizing later that you're being an asshole. I certainly did it. But this had real consequences. People committed suicide due to what people said online. The saying was, "If you die on the internet, you die in real life." So when n00bs came online, we recognized that it was important that those n00bs learn to be kind, or be kicked out. This wasn't an elitist sneer at newcomers, it was telling people, "Hey, you can't be an asshole here just because you can't see the person you're talking to." There was never a sense of superiority or gatekeeping that I remember: it was always coming from a place of, "Hey I made this mistake too, but you can't keep making it". This happened yearly, each September, due to the influx of students accessing the internet for the first time through their college's computers. So each year, we had to teach people how to behave kindly online. And it worked. By August of the next year, these communities were truly kind and friendly spaces. Spaces which are extremely difficult to find online now. And again, this wasn't about gatekeeping. Part of the beauty of these spaces was that anyone could join, and the pace of people joining wasn't being enforced--it just organically happened to be slow enough that those people could be educated and integrated. "Eternal September" occurred when AOL opened the floodgates to a steady, unrelenting stream of n00bs. There were upsides to this which I don't want to downplay, but for the communities which existed before this, it was an immediate and total annihilation. No longer could the experienced users teach the n00bs how to be kind online. There were simply too many n00bs, constantly. Eternal September IS ongoing. There are still more n00bs coming online and being assholes to each other because they don't recognize that there's another person on the other end of the line. People are still committing suicide due to what people say to them online. And in addition to the n00bs, there's now a vast backlog of experienced users who have never learned to not be assholes online. The internet is generally not a kind place. And it's honestly pretty fucked up that some people will remember our internet history this way. "You can't be an asshole here" isn't a sneer on the onramp. It's not the same as gatekeeping. In fact, being mean to n00bs or gatekeeping are directly antithetical to what we were trying to do back then.