Eternal September

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.<p>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&#x27;t have to, they didn&#x27;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&#x27;t think you have to raise that bar by much at all.

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

It&#x27;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).

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

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.

This brings a whole new meaning to &quot;Wake Me Up When September Ends.&quot;

I had always associated the Eternal September specifically with AOL.<p>However, the Wikipedia article seems to be accurate as far as I can tell from referenced sources--even if some <i>other</i> sources conflate AOL offering Usenet access beginning in, apparently, March 1994 with the September 1993 Eternal September date.<p>It&#x27;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.

Somewhat off-topic, but what&#x27;s up with the date widget in the top right? It has today&#x27;s date, and then &quot;September 10517, 1993&quot;

I remember a friend telling me about this forum called &#x27;Digg&#x27; back in 2006 or so. &#x27;A bunch of cool libertarians&#x27; is how he described it. I discovered reddit a couple years after that and would&#x27;ve described it the same way. Times change.