6 ms·

"Eternal September" has big "I can't believe they let those people into the country club" energy. Gatekeeping is bad. It might feel good when you're on the rig

by mjb 3y ago

"Eternal September" has big "I can't believe they let those people into the country club" energy. Gatekeeping is bad. It might feel good when you're on the right side of the gate. It might even feel righteous. After all, you deserved it, by being in the in group. But gatekeeping on arbitrary criteria is always bad, and we diminish ourselves when we encourage it. For me, the gatekeepers are worse for the Internet and it's communities than all the new people. It's great that the internet's gate is open. Let's celebrate that.

chrisco255 3y ago
Welp, the gatekeepers lost / won depending on how you look at it. There was no stopping the internet of course, but Usenet fell into irrelevance somewhere along the line. Which is I guess, getting their wish?
cosmojg 3y ago
I hate gatekeepers as much as the next guy, but I'll take Usenet over TikTok any day of the week. I suppose a better world requires sacrifice.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  My childhood was superior to your childhood. Nostalgia is a tale as old as time.
  - type0 3y ago
    Choosing usenet over tiktok has nothing to do with nostalgia, it has everything to do with online freedom
    - TechBro8615 3y ago
      It has everything to do with nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only reason you can even express a concept as nebulous as "online freedom," when hardly anyone in the current generation can even conceptualize what that means, nevermind how it's lacking in TikTok, or why they would desire it in the first place. Waxing nostalgic for the "online freedom" of usenet is no different than extolling the virtues of "hard work" that are lost on those damn kids nowadays who don't even need to hike up a snowy hill to get to school.
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        Only to school? Back in my day, we had to hike up a snowy hill both ways!
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        Hi, I've never used Usenet not TikTok. I would take Usenet over TikTok any day of the week. That's not nostalgia. That's Usenet being more compatible with my values as an individual than TikTok.
        Zambyte 3y ago
        Noticed a typo after the edit window passed. Nor* not not.
throwaway22032 3y ago
I couldn't disagree more strongly. Gatekeeping is an essential component of maintaining high standards. Using arbitrary criteria is bad because it doesn't lead to high standards. But with finely tuned criteria (e.g. using signals which actually do correlate with what you're trying to achieve) it's a powerful tool.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  If we extend the metaphor of a gate, then gatekeeping prevents the introduction of evolutionary bottlenecks, meaning the population stagnates in the absence of any external pressure to mutate.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    Quite the opposite, gatekeeping behavior evolved because societies that gatekeep are more evolutionarily successful than those that don't. It is to multi-multi-cellular organisms (that is, social groups) what immune systems are for multi-cellular organisms.
  - shagie 3y ago
    ... and we write this on a site that has resisted becoming a "modern" social media site. > Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African- Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. > Now, the segmentation can be total—you’re in or you’re out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial—anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves. > Now, this pulls against the cardinal programming virtue of ease of use, but ease of use is the wrong goal for social software. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction, toward the individual, when in fact, the user of a piece of social software is the group. From A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) - Four Things To Design For
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I generally like embracing the new & novel, leaving the door open. But also I can easily see: places without gates are subject to tragedy of the commons. Cultures & societies need some ability to uphold themselves, their distinctions & their norms. At least when newcomers came in waves (pre AOL era), there was some ability to prepare & make fast the ship, as September arrived. But having eternal flux, forever having new people come in who have no barriers, no rules, no culturation is a hard situation. What do you see as the positive forces to keep things together? How do we keep the valuable community together & feeling cohesive, feeling a sense of community, under forever hard conditions? In this view, it's not about gatekeeping (an easy slur to levy imo), it's a real question, a real challenge; how does anything endure, how do we curate value & sense, when flux & incursion is the only constant?
- throwaway22032 3y ago
  The attempted conversion of gatekeeping into a slur (it's not - it simply refers to upholding standards) is in fact an attack on the concept of tradition in general. There are a lot of people who simply don't respect the concept of tradition or the idea that something can be time tested. They feel that everything can simply be reasoned from first principles, which is tempting (particularly when young) but misguided.
  - bavell 3y ago
    100% agreed. Chesterton's fence[0] is a foreign concept to them. After all, how could those archaic morons in the past without our advanced technology have possibly landed on a better solution than the one some friends and I came up with but haven't yet put into practice? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Terr_ 3y ago
Maybe a little, but I think the bigger part was the perpetual churn. Not just a bigger club, nor even different people arriving, but a fundamentally different environment because there's no consolidation-phase.
Ferret7446 3y ago
A community has no moral obligation to accommodate outsiders with different values. Rather, the outsider has a moral obligation to adopt the values of the community if they want to join. When a large group of people join a community and disregard/replace their values, that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term. The original community never consented to it.
- chillbill 3y ago
  It’s not a community in the sense of a small town community or an actual country club. Most people from that Usenet era were nerdy early 20 year olds who thought they were the shit (and in some aspects the were, but in others they weren’t). Some like Dave Fischer (who probably coined the term [1]) even thinks that they were wrong in preventing “the idiots” from coming in. The elitist attitude is the same whether you want people to conform to a specific etiquette when posting on Usenet or want specific people out of politics or positions of power because “we just don’t do things like that on the hill”. 1] https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wF4CpYbWuuA/m/jS6ZOyJd10sJ https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wF4CpYb...
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > A community has no moral obligation to accommodate outsiders with different values. Rather, the outsider has a moral obligation to adopt the values of the community if they want to join. It's written declaratively, but that is no indication that it's true or right. IMHO communities do have a strong moral obligation to be open to outsiders: It is necessary to a functioning society, it reduces corruption, and it helps the outsider. Also, the community benefits from having new blood - it will wither and corrupt itself without it. > that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term Colonialism is not about outsiders coming inside, it's about power. If in the 19th century a bunch of people from southern Africa came to the UK, the UK wouldn't have been colonized (obviously). The southern Africans didn't have that power, and thus couldn't have used it to inflict the associated harms on the people in the UK. But the UK did have the power and did inflict the harms.
  - 3y ago
shagie 3y ago
I recall just the other month when there was much bemoaning and gnashing of teeth about how former reddit people were showing up here in more significant numbers than the general trickle previously and the comments along the line responding to new users leaving 'lol' as the entirety of the comment "this is not Reddit - comments and contributions are expected to be significant or constructive." And if HN didn't try to retain its identity, then we'd be adapting to people leaving "LOL" comments and extended pun chains. Is that gatekeeping?
giantrobot 3y ago
> But gatekeeping on arbitrary criteria is always bad, and we diminish ourselves when we encourage it. Oh please. Usenet had been routinely accepting new years since its inception. Even the phrase "Eternal September" is a reference to the regular influx of new users with every freshman college class getting Internet access for the first time. Many Usenet groups were unmoderated and were vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. Introducing new Usenet users to FAQs and etiquette was important meta moderation. This ad-hoc community moderation had no control over actual group content besides bozo filters. When AOL connected their users to Usenet it broke the ad-hoc community onboarding. A big problem with AOL's users specifically were they treated Usenet as an extension of AOL's chat rooms. It's little different if Discord or TikTok suddenly added a "join the conversation of Hacker News" button. A million teenagers would be a bit more moderation than even the mighty dang could handle.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Most of us encountered conversations where some AOL dickhead threatened to get some Usenet person's account revoked because they didn't understand they weren't in their walled garden anymore. It wasn't just that they were new, or idiots. It was that they were entitled new idiots.
kelnos 3y ago
I think in this case it's a bit more nuanced. I don't think the Usenet denizens of old were against new members. September usually brought an influx of new users when university freshmen would start school (at the time, many people's first introduction to the internet was when they got a connection at their university). It would be a bit of work, but over the next couple months the old-timers would acclimate the newcomers to Usenet etiquette, and all would be well. The issue with the Eternal September was that AOL users suddenly got Usenet access, and the constant flood of new, un-acclimated users was too much for the existing users to handle. Yes, I agree that there's still a degree of gatekeeping there, but communities have standards, and community standards (assuming they're good ones) are usually a great way to maintain civility and keep things on track and on topic.

by mjb 3y ago

chrisco255 3y ago

Welp, the gatekeepers lost / won depending on how you look at it. There was no stopping the internet of course, but Usenet fell into irrelevance somewhere along the line. Which is I guess, getting their wish?

cosmojg 3y ago

I hate gatekeepers as much as the next guy, but I'll take Usenet over TikTok any day of the week. I suppose a better world requires sacrifice.

TechBro8615 3y ago
My childhood was superior to your childhood. Nostalgia is a tale as old as time.
- type0 3y ago
  Choosing usenet over tiktok has nothing to do with nostalgia, it has everything to do with online freedom
  - TechBro8615 3y ago
    It has everything to do with nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only reason you can even express a concept as nebulous as "online freedom," when hardly anyone in the current generation can even conceptualize what that means, nevermind how it's lacking in TikTok, or why they would desire it in the first place. Waxing nostalgic for the "online freedom" of usenet is no different than extolling the virtues of "hard work" that are lost on those damn kids nowadays who don't even need to hike up a snowy hill to get to school.
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      Only to school? Back in my day, we had to hike up a snowy hill both ways!
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      Hi, I've never used Usenet not TikTok. I would take Usenet over TikTok any day of the week. That's not nostalgia. That's Usenet being more compatible with my values as an individual than TikTok.
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        Noticed a typo after the edit window passed. Nor* not not.

throwaway22032 3y ago

I couldn't disagree more strongly. Gatekeeping is an essential component of maintaining high standards. Using arbitrary criteria is bad because it doesn't lead to high standards. But with finely tuned criteria (e.g. using signals which actually do correlate with what you're trying to achieve) it's a powerful tool.

TechBro8615 3y ago
If we extend the metaphor of a gate, then gatekeeping prevents the introduction of evolutionary bottlenecks, meaning the population stagnates in the absence of any external pressure to mutate.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  Quite the opposite, gatekeeping behavior evolved because societies that gatekeep are more evolutionarily successful than those that don't. It is to multi-multi-cellular organisms (that is, social groups) what immune systems are for multi-cellular organisms.
- shagie 3y ago
  ... and we write this on a site that has resisted becoming a "modern" social media site. > Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African- Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. > Now, the segmentation can be total—you’re in or you’re out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial—anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves. > Now, this pulls against the cardinal programming virtue of ease of use, but ease of use is the wrong goal for social software. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction, toward the individual, when in fact, the user of a piece of social software is the group. From A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) - Four Things To Design For

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I generally like embracing the new & novel, leaving the door open. But also I can easily see: places without gates are subject to tragedy of the commons. Cultures & societies need some ability to uphold themselves, their distinctions & their norms. At least when newcomers came in waves (pre AOL era), there was some ability to prepare & make fast the ship, as September arrived. But having eternal flux, forever having new people come in who have no barriers, no rules, no culturation is a hard situation. What do you see as the positive forces to keep things together? How do we keep the valuable community together & feeling cohesive, feeling a sense of community, under forever hard conditions? In this view, it's not about gatekeeping (an easy slur to levy imo), it's a real question, a real challenge; how does anything endure, how do we curate value & sense, when flux & incursion is the only constant?

throwaway22032 3y ago
The attempted conversion of gatekeeping into a slur (it's not - it simply refers to upholding standards) is in fact an attack on the concept of tradition in general. There are a lot of people who simply don't respect the concept of tradition or the idea that something can be time tested. They feel that everything can simply be reasoned from first principles, which is tempting (particularly when young) but misguided.
- bavell 3y ago
  100% agreed. Chesterton's fence[0] is a foreign concept to them. After all, how could those archaic morons in the past without our advanced technology have possibly landed on a better solution than the one some friends and I came up with but haven't yet put into practice? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

Terr_ 3y ago

Maybe a little, but I think the bigger part was the perpetual churn. Not just a bigger club, nor even different people arriving, but a fundamentally different environment because there's no consolidation-phase.

Ferret7446 3y ago

A community has no moral obligation to accommodate outsiders with different values. Rather, the outsider has a moral obligation to adopt the values of the community if they want to join. When a large group of people join a community and disregard/replace their values, that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term. The original community never consented to it.

chillbill 3y ago
It’s not a community in the sense of a small town community or an actual country club. Most people from that Usenet era were nerdy early 20 year olds who thought they were the shit (and in some aspects the were, but in others they weren’t). Some like Dave Fischer (who probably coined the term [1]) even thinks that they were wrong in preventing “the idiots” from coming in. The elitist attitude is the same whether you want people to conform to a specific etiquette when posting on Usenet or want specific people out of politics or positions of power because “we just don’t do things like that on the hill”. 1] https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wF4CpYbWuuA/m/jS6ZOyJd10sJ https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wF4CpYb...
wolverine876 3y ago
> A community has no moral obligation to accommodate outsiders with different values. Rather, the outsider has a moral obligation to adopt the values of the community if they want to join. It's written declaratively, but that is no indication that it's true or right. IMHO communities do have a strong moral obligation to be open to outsiders: It is necessary to a functioning society, it reduces corruption, and it helps the outsider. Also, the community benefits from having new blood - it will wither and corrupt itself without it. > that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term Colonialism is not about outsiders coming inside, it's about power. If in the 19th century a bunch of people from southern Africa came to the UK, the UK wouldn't have been colonized (obviously). The southern Africans didn't have that power, and thus couldn't have used it to inflict the associated harms on the people in the UK. But the UK did have the power and did inflict the harms.
- 3y ago

shagie 3y ago

I recall just the other month when there was much bemoaning and gnashing of teeth about how former reddit people were showing up here in more significant numbers than the general trickle previously and the comments along the line responding to new users leaving 'lol' as the entirety of the comment "this is not Reddit - comments and contributions are expected to be significant or constructive." And if HN didn't try to retain its identity, then we'd be adapting to people leaving "LOL" comments and extended pun chains. Is that gatekeeping?

giantrobot 3y ago

> But gatekeeping on arbitrary criteria is always bad, and we diminish ourselves when we encourage it. Oh please. Usenet had been routinely accepting new years since its inception. Even the phrase "Eternal September" is a reference to the regular influx of new users with every freshman college class getting Internet access for the first time. Many Usenet groups were unmoderated and were vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. Introducing new Usenet users to FAQs and etiquette was important meta moderation. This ad-hoc community moderation had no control over actual group content besides bozo filters. When AOL connected their users to Usenet it broke the ad-hoc community onboarding. A big problem with AOL's users specifically were they treated Usenet as an extension of AOL's chat rooms. It's little different if Discord or TikTok suddenly added a "join the conversation of Hacker News" button. A million teenagers would be a bit more moderation than even the mighty dang could handle.

hinkley 3y ago
Most of us encountered conversations where some AOL dickhead threatened to get some Usenet person's account revoked because they didn't understand they weren't in their walled garden anymore. It wasn't just that they were new, or idiots. It was that they were entitled new idiots.

kelnos 3y ago

I think in this case it's a bit more nuanced. I don't think the Usenet denizens of old were against new members. September usually brought an influx of new users when university freshmen would start school (at the time, many people's first introduction to the internet was when they got a connection at their university). It would be a bit of work, but over the next couple months the old-timers would acclimate the newcomers to Usenet etiquette, and all would be well. The issue with the Eternal September was that AOL users suddenly got Usenet access, and the constant flood of new, un-acclimated users was too much for the existing users to handle. Yes, I agree that there's still a degree of gatekeeping there, but communities have standards, and community standards (assuming they're good ones) are usually a great way to maintain civility and keep things on track and on topic.