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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. We live in the eternal September.

But to be honest the internet is still the internet. The web still exists. Any lamentation at the loss of the "old" internet is that you don't have more angry uncles spewing political rhetoric on your motorcycle forum.

Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums? I certainly don't. Seems to me things are working pretty well. I do worry about the next generation but to be honest, the same was said about me.

Instead of complaining about the state of the web just be the change. Host your site, run your forums, live your life. Stop worrying about how other people should live their lives. Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.

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FYI: Wiki says: <<Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993[2] when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.>>

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

> Take some youngsters under your wing and show them how a keyboard works instead of a touch screen.

This x1000.

The only way to ensure that future people can continue to maintain things is to teach those who are interested.

While I think we need to scale back the opaqueness of tech to the average user[0], there will always be some who just know more.

[0] By which I don't mean "more configuration options", because the average user doesn't want those.

I mean make it easy to access the source - and just as importantly make it easy to use changes to said source, so those who think, hm, I want this, can learn to fix it themselves, or find someone who can.

> Do you want the unwashed masses in your specialist forums?

Having the choice between "unwashed masses" and "curated to suit political agenda" I would firmly choose the former.

Before I get attacked on political agenda angle, please understand that it takes trained professional actively trying to remain objective to have impartial moderation. Many professional discussion moderators fail here and you just cannot expect neither unpaid volunteers (doing things out of passion which is not impartial in the first place) nor paid employees enforcing company policy (again very much partial) to remain objective.

The goal of moderation should be to allow for multiple angles of thought to emerge and not get drowned. Give me the tools to see those non-mainstream positions.

> unwashed masses

The unwashed masses are often filthy and malicious (on the internet).

Moderation, of the governance and oversight meaning, is unforunately very necessary to keeping any pool from becoming a cesspit. By some combination of technical, volunteer, and participant effort (membership fee, or service requirement), areas can be kept decent.

Without this, decent and would-be participants are run off by spam, scams, trolls and harrassment, political rants, religious rants, etc.

Hence what happened to Usenet. I was active on comp.lang.c comp.lang.c.moderated comp.sys.3b1 comp.sys.3b2 back in the mid 1990s, by 1998, it had become a total hot mess. The moderated groups imploded, or shutdown, when the moderators just gave up. In particular, comp.lang.c.moderated was a fountain of knowledge on C language implementation specifics, then a few really pedantic asshats joined, and their MO was purely slandering and shouting. They had agendas, and they had no interest in sharing knowledge. I think a couple of them thought they could affect the evolution of the language, from outside ANSI, to suit their own personal opinions. Nasty little dictators. I completely dropped off usenet around 1998. In retrospect, I hung on for to long, hoping for a return to rational behavior.

Wonderfully put. I would add that we need to see things for their scale and proportion. Yes, the simple walled web is bigger than ever. So is the hacker community, and this website (so far as I can tell), Reddit (for all its faults), etc.

It is a bit more complicated than that.

Admninistration web sites are now forcing you to use google(blink/geeko) or apple(webkit) based browsers. Asking nicely to restore interoperability with noscript/basic (x)html browsers does not seem to work, namely keeping the door open to alternatives requiring a reasonable effort of development, and not the army of devs of big tech.

This requires regulation I guess.

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