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Comment by RJSquirel | Hacker News Reader

>Honestly it was Disneyland compared to FB.

Except for the "Eternal September" part of the park.

The September That Never Ended was Bad.

It resulted in the Web suddenly becoming open, and full of ill-informed opinions, and populated by large crowds of ignorant, obnoxious, know-nothing users, wearing cargo shorts, Hawai'ian shirts, and socks and sandals, wandering around, pawing all the exhibits.

The September That Never Ended was Good.

That's when the real money started to hit the Internet.

All those Teslas that average-level programmers are driving around, these days, are because of all those "tourists," and their loud shirts.

> All those Teslas that average-level programmers are driving around, these days, are because of all those "tourists," and their loud shirts.

I am average programmer, but not SV. I still haven't been paid well enough to buy a Tesla.

Have you considered stealing some FAANG jobs?

Those are difficult to get. That is even besides the point that working for FAANG is advancing immoral uses of technology.

Same (not SV, average programmer), but I am paid well enough now. But it took 15-20 years to catch up to my SV friends. And only because I now work for a SV HQ'd company.

No, it always had tons of ill-informed opinions and obnoxious users. The difference is that people were able to put it in perspective.

It was just the "exotic" opinion of some anonymous user on the internet you will very likely never meet in real life. Crazy and colorful opinions made a lot of places interesting in the first place, meeting people completely different from yourself or similar to you in ways you could't or didn't want to share with close friends.

The demand that everything wrong should be purged from the internet is fairly recent. Today users demand conformity like they demand it from their TV and newspaper.

yeah deplatformming makes me think of Walter Cronkite. One side wants it their way, and that will be the way it is.

There will always be an Eternal September in any mass communications system that is open to the public.

Disneyland has been operating for 70 something years and there are still thousands if not millions of first timers arriving every year.

Yes but Disneyland has refined its crowd control and experience to fine point. You don't see the chaos and mess because Disney spends a lot of money (and has lots of people working the parks) to contain and direct it. Even something as simple and common as a guest getting sick on a ride, Disney has a response team to handle it and keep the "Happiest Place on Earth" image alive.

Try that kind of curation and moderation in an online forum for people that size and within a week you'd have the right wing yelling about "cancel culture" and GOP senators calling hearings on Big Tech censors.

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