Eternal September

Yes but you can’t deny that giving everyone a level playing field is a net positive. There will be problems with that like hate speech, trolling, harassment etc but that can be addressed with safety measures and moderation, which social networks employ although they don’t stomp out everything and anonymous accounts are still a problem.

Of course, pre-Eternal September, you only got to access the Internet if you went to the right schools or worked for the right companies or government organizations. Which in certain ways was certainly better for the haves but also makes for some pretty heavy-duty gatekeeping.

So everything else that the internet offers is worthless because you can't have a particular subjective experience in the past? People can't benefit from computers because you don't approve?

Everytime this particular subject comes up, commenters are quick to chime with their experiences or actual messages, and I don't think the quality of the posts was as good on average as you think. Usenet had weirdos, trolls, crazy people, political nutjobs, racists, and plenty of inane posts too. I think you're nostalgic for something that never existed.

I think everyone probably needs some internet at home, but at this stage I think smartphones should be illegal or at least heavily taxed and regulated like alcohol.

At some point we overcorrected when trying to simplify things and now folks are being forced against their will to cede privacy to big corps in exchange for security and availability of their data instead of having to learn and understand how to do that themselves. At which point everything becomes a constant treadmill of walled gardens further insulating them in an attempt to not have them go learn something new.

Mobile ruined the internet

The majority of people go to the most-popular (walled garden) social media these days.

In that sense, the majority rarely realise what the internet is [1] and that it's more than just Facebook, Amazon etc.

> It takes no effort to get online and speak your mind so nobody respects the technology.

In my day, you either walked past the crazy person on the street corner and paid no attention to their insane rantings, or you spent several days cutting out letters from a newspaper and glueing them onto A4 before popping in the snail-mail.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

This comes off as extremely elitist, like you don't want the lowborn peasants on the Internet.

That said, I understand where you're coming from. The Internet has given a megaphone to every moron on the planet.

Computation and access to information are sources of power within our civilization -- ensuring easy access to both should be a goal of our society, lest one group conclude that another group is unworthy.

With that power comes responsibility. It is on us to promulgate cultural norms to exist in this new world, where we choose to do unto others as we would have done unto us.

Humanity is so new to grappling with these changes -- we are only beginning to understand the impacts and implications inherent to our newly-constructed tools. The world was a simpler and less-connected place when I was a child -- my earliest computer memories include an 8086 and one of the first few 1200 bps modems in our entire town of 30,000 people. Uploading a single image from my smartphone at those rates would, in the best case, take more than five hours.

None of us earned the internet ourselves. It emerged through the uncoordinated efforts of billions of people. We limit access to it at our collective peril.

I think, "democratizing complicated or beautiful things" (ie. music, Internet, education, information) is the myth of the day alongside other prevalent myths like, "elite rule isn't the norm for humans" "The real basis of legal rights is a religious object" (this applies just as badly to Liberals in their belief in equality as much as it does Christian Conservatives who believe Jesus was our first president) and especially, "self-determination for common people is the highest good humanity could ever realize."

I really, really hate to say this but I'm beginning to have sympathies with Ayn Rand's literature. We don't let, "normal people" into operating rooms; why is it that the public has been invited to the conversation about complicated things like science, medicine, philosophy, ethics (..?)

Worth relating: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/708391

> 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't think you have to raise that bar by much at all.

I think you're underestimating the effort people can put into voicing their opinions, specially if they're controversial, or they built their personality around them.

Why is your framing and solution to exclude people? In the "early internet," the SNR nostalgia you have was primarily a result of better moderation, not exclusion of the "masses." That said, the decline of moderation can occur with the addition of new users without a proportionate increase of moderators and such. Still, they are not logically equivalent, it is principally the lack of moderation which is the actual issue. Systems if they want to maintain norms need to adapt to changing times.

Ironically people's starting point for "when things became bad" is almost always after they join, so even "seasoned users" disagree on the start of the decline in general. That's the problem with exclusionary rhetoric in almost all walks of life, because the easiest response to any sort of "we're full" rhetoric is and should be "you leave first" and such a response has no real counter.

> if the early internet adopters had thought about how to welcome and help people, rather than engaging in salty gatekeeping.

But they did actually welcome and help people. The earliest ISPs were exactly that: attempts to welcome and help people to join the internet.

Eternal September is more a function of the number of people in a particular community not about whether or not people help other newcomers to join. The difference is that the early folks came from the tech world and had a level of involvement that was entirely different from the one that the later joiners had and so we ended up with a significantly dumbed down and re-siloed internet.

The creator:consumer ratio is what dropped.

I would argue that the early adopters were inconsequential. They were too few in numbers to affect anything.

The internet created a culture on it's own, one that continues to be a challenge to integrate into society, because human nature weren't designed for it. It's a new environment, and our information processing capabilities and peculiarities lack the adaptation for it. The internet is a bold experiment.

Early adopters were actually quite welcoming. It's just that the usenet communities had informal social norms that took time to acclimate to. When newcomers come in large numbers all at once then they overwhelm the acclimatization process to the informal norms and it becomes a free-for-all.

It used to be considered good netiquette to not barge into a chat and start talking and peppering people with questions immediately before you get to know who is who. But the modern internet is more focused on making you engage with it at all times so the idea of "lurking" as a virtuous thing is basically gone. Platforms make a point of trying to coax and goad you out of lurker mode so you can inflict your bad takes on everyone else, so that you can prompt more bad takes from me and others in a feedback loop.

I was there and was very welcomed. Local computer clubs, BBSes, and more. It was way more welcoming than the internet now. The salty gatekeeping as I recall was against corporatised versions of the internet (AOL), but in the end that battle was lost.

People were welcoming, but much like a company that hires too fast, the culture was swamped by all the new people (who weren’t bad intentioned, but were definitely way more open to walled gardens and being consumers over creators.)

I am amused that people like you assume that they put no thought into the question, because you don't like their answer.

Many Usenet forums back then which had over 100,000 regular readers and long-running discussions. For example sci.math. That worked fine with a culture of saying things accurately and simply, without undue handholding. And an expectation that the other side would put in their own elbow grease.

While effective in that culture, this is exactly the kind of behavior that outsiders call "salty gatekeeping". Never mind that the people who are being called that are often the same people who are answering question after question, and being genuinely helpful.

I do not know of any comparable unmoderated forum today which works close to that well. Or where someone with a genuine question can so reliably get high quality answers from a genuine expert.

E^2S?

One of the lucky 10,000

https://xkcd.com/1053/

EESS: Eternal "Eternal September" September?

Or, to enable infix-nesting, (Eternal (Eternal September) September).

On HN, self-referential irony abides. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781040

Eternity is a long time

I distinctively remember a massive influx of children in PokerStars VR in December 2020/January 2021. A lot of kids must have gotten a Quest 2 for Christmas.

But more to your point, yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about the existence of the Quest 2. On one hand, it brings the price of VR way down which potentially increases adoption, but on the other hand, the lack of GPU power means graphics are dumbed down, and the tracking on its controllers isn't as good as PCVR, so I worry it could also lead to its downfall as the experience is sub-par.

I don't know if I would say new, Eternal September had already been in progress for 11½ years when the Green Day song was released.

See the "Legacy" part in that article.