It’s Time for the Eternal September to End

Once you reach a critical mass of users that will sustain discussion, you will see a gradual rise in quality as a small board of passionate users will organically attract likeminded individuals, who typically contribute and elevate the discussion. Everyone is highly motivated to explore, discuss, and challenge ideas with each other and decorum is usually quite polite, as to them there was no other place you could engage so freely with these ideas with likeminded individuals.

At a certain point though, you seem to cross a rubicon where the new users are less informed, less motivated/passionate, and don't contribute anything new or novel to the discussion. This is quickly followed by an exodus of the most informed/important voices who aren't interested in dealing with uninformed conjecture, or novice matters that aren't particularly interesting to someone who has more subject matter expertise.

This progresses to the end state of the board, where there are very few if any true believers to whatever the original intent of the board was, and the posting reflects that as it moves further and further from the intended subject and more into meta and social. I'd describe this state as similar to the discourse you'd see on twitter today: rude, tribal, uninformed, speculative, etc.

I do agree that the general quality of Usenet nosedived around then but it had more to do with the transition to other forums than with the influx of AOL users.

Seems to me that after 12 years, Vice maybe shouldn't be judged for it's founders vices [pun intended].