It'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).
> 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.
Yes. And there was also an impact that instead of an influx of new people on a regular cadence it was never ending. People were used to a brief disruption of netiquette standards and then things would go back to normal. But once the gates opened it was a never ending, yet increasing, set of new people arriving every day. It didn't take long for the new folks to outnumber the old hands.
To your creator:consumer point, that is also true. And I also think part of it was that the existing crowd couldn't comprehend that this was the case. People on Usenet at the time tended toward certain personality types. It was a bit of a shock when the average poster started to have wildly different goals and expectations.
> The earliest ISPs were exactly that: attempts to welcome and help people to join the internet.
As a (mostly former) member of some old communities: it were just the same in the all cases, a small group of visionaries (or just a bunch of folks high on enthusiasm) which are slowly deluted by innate bureucrats and the grind of describing the same things over and over to the people who can't see the bright red "FAQ: NEWCOMERS PLEASE READ!" right in their faces.
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.
This is why I love the discussion forums that have survived since the early 2000s. They're decently moderated, not enough 'engagement' crap for most people to be interested and a strong culture that doesn't tolerate low-content posting.
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 do remember thinking it funny how in less than a year the culture shifted from poking fun at .edu addresses to viewing those same .edu addresses as a good signal once all the big .coms like AOL came online.
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.
yes and no. Yes I agree that what you say is true. However I also remember things like people "winning" arguments by citing the other person's @aol.com or @prodigy.com email address. There was a bit of both there.
Seems that the song was unrelated to Eternal September.
> "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was written by frontman Billie Joe Armstrong about his father, who died from esophageal cancer in September 1982 when Armstrong was 10 years old. Armstrong, at one point, dubbed the song the most autobiographical he had written to that point, considering it "therapeutic" but also difficult to perform.
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.
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't have to, they didn'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't think you have to raise that bar by much at all.
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.
Yes but you can’t deny that giving everyone a level playing field is a net positive.
Sure I can.
Giving millions of random uneducated whackjobs an equal voice with actual trained medical professionals poses a real threat to public health. That's exactly what's happened.
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.
But forums did have better moderation and actively prevented flame wars. Social media quite literally encourages flame wars on a societal/global scale.
>But forums did have better moderation and actively prevented flame wars.
I don't recall a lot of moderation and I do recall flame wars. I think most of the moderation was social norms, especially in an environment where many were posting under their own names from university/company/government accounts.
Why the past tense? Forums - like this one - still exist. And it's easier then ever to make a moderated forum (a subreddit, a discord server, a facebook group).
In the case of Reddit, niche subreddits can be handled by a couple of moderators, but once they become popular and you have thousands of people breaking the rules, you need a full time team of capable moderators.
In forums like the old Slashdot or here, users can moderate with varying degrees of skill with their votes, but users of popular subreddits will happily upvote a serial reposter in the thousands before the mods can take action, they have no idea what the rules are, and even will get mad if the mods "oppress" them.
On a side note, I believe Internet usage should be an obligatory subject in school, but not for etiquette, but for common sense and resiliency against manipulation. Add socialization, mental health, and parenting too if you're changing the study plans.
No. I didn't say that and I don't think I implied that either.
Benefitting from technology and having direct access to the means are not one and the same.
I get to benefit from the interstate highway system but that doesn't mean I can just go and add lanes or off and on ramps wherever I want.
Raising the bar to access doesn't mean people don't get the economic benefit of a connected world. It means speaking your mind in an online forum is hardware than downloading the twitter app and tapping a few buttons.
I'll bite; yes precisely. You sound like a brownshirt trying to justify smashing a wealthy Jewish' person's antique statue. The public ruins our nice things and we have a right to complain; we also have the right to keep our nice things from degradation through democratization. It's worth noting that almost every single classical commentator from Socrates up until the Enlightenment considered, "Damos-cracy" (Democracy) an undesirable form of government; Mob rule.
Remember it's not, "waspy old Conservatives" that keep new housing from being built in San Francisco-- No, it's rich Palo Alto liberals empowered by free market neoliberal power structures that keep guys that wear sock-with-sandals in multi-million dollar homes. Think about it awhile.
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.
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.
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 (..?)
> 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.
My framing isn't to actively exclude people like some stuck up gatekeeper. Its to stop lowering the bar of entry to anyone who wants to shoot off their dumb opinions online has to expend at least a little effort and brainpower to get there. Lowering the bar to allow even the most willfully tech illiterate to effortlessly post on places like twitter guarantee tragedy of the commons.
Compare the R/C plane hobby before and after Drones hit the market. Before quadcopter drones, R/C aircraft were difficult to fly and required an investment of time and discipline to master the skill. This meant the community was fairly small and dedicated. And it was able to effectively self govern for decades with basically no government intervention required.
Then quadcopters hit the market and it took not even 10 years before the FAA had to intervene because idiots who had no skill or respect for the technology were flying around airports, public gatherings and other restricted areas. Even though things practically fly themselves they were crashing into people and their property. There were serious injuries because they were flown by morons.
So the FAA had to step in and become the gatekeeper.
Is crashing a drone into a person's car or a child the same as idiots on social media? No, but irresponsible use of social media has ruined plenty of people's lives. The connect isn't as obvious but the damage is still there.
We haven't started requiring social media licenses because speech is a protected right of course. And we shouldn't change that. But that means there should be some social responsibility.
I had always associated the Eternal September specifically with AOL.
However, the Wikipedia article seems to be accurate as far as I can tell from referenced sources--even if some other sources conflate AOL offering Usenet access beginning in, apparently, March 1994 with the September 1993 Eternal September date.
It'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.
I remember a friend telling me about this forum called 'Digg' back in 2006 or so. 'A bunch of cool libertarians' is how he described it. I discovered reddit a couple years after that and would've described it the same way. Times change.
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadBut 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.
To your creator:consumer point, that is also true. And I also think part of it was that the existing crowd couldn't comprehend that this was the case. People on Usenet at the time tended toward certain personality types. It was a bit of a shock when the average poster started to have wildly different goals and expectations.
As a (mostly former) member of some old communities: it were just the same in the all cases, a small group of visionaries (or just a bunch of folks high on enthusiasm) which are slowly deluted by innate bureucrats and the grind of describing the same things over and over to the people who can't see the bright red "FAQ: NEWCOMERS PLEASE READ!" right in their faces.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
But I've known many incredibly helpful people who get called on "salty gatekeeping". In fact I've been called on that myself.
> "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was written by frontman Billie Joe Armstrong about his father, who died from esophageal cancer in September 1982 when Armstrong was 10 years old. Armstrong, at one point, dubbed the song the most autobiographical he had written to that point, considering it "therapeutic" but also difficult to perform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Me_Up_When_September_Ends
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Or, to enable infix-nesting, (Eternal (Eternal September) September).
On HN, self-referential irony abides. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781040
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't have to, they didn'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't think you have to raise that bar by much at all.
Sure I can.
Giving millions of random uneducated whackjobs an equal voice with actual trained medical professionals poses a real threat to public health. That's exactly what's happened.
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 don't recall a lot of moderation and I do recall flame wars. I think most of the moderation was social norms, especially in an environment where many were posting under their own names from university/company/government accounts.
In forums like the old Slashdot or here, users can moderate with varying degrees of skill with their votes, but users of popular subreddits will happily upvote a serial reposter in the thousands before the mods can take action, they have no idea what the rules are, and even will get mad if the mods "oppress" them.
On a side note, I believe Internet usage should be an obligatory subject in school, but not for etiquette, but for common sense and resiliency against manipulation. Add socialization, mental health, and parenting too if you're changing the study plans.
Benefitting from technology and having direct access to the means are not one and the same.
I get to benefit from the interstate highway system but that doesn't mean I can just go and add lanes or off and on ramps wherever I want.
Raising the bar to access doesn't mean people don't get the economic benefit of a connected world. It means speaking your mind in an online forum is hardware than downloading the twitter app and tapping a few buttons.
Remember it's not, "waspy old Conservatives" that keep new housing from being built in San Francisco-- No, it's rich Palo Alto liberals empowered by free market neoliberal power structures that keep guys that wear sock-with-sandals in multi-million dollar homes. Think about it awhile.
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
That said, I understand where you're coming from. The Internet has given a megaphone to every moron on the planet.
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 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
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.
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.
Compare the R/C plane hobby before and after Drones hit the market. Before quadcopter drones, R/C aircraft were difficult to fly and required an investment of time and discipline to master the skill. This meant the community was fairly small and dedicated. And it was able to effectively self govern for decades with basically no government intervention required.
Then quadcopters hit the market and it took not even 10 years before the FAA had to intervene because idiots who had no skill or respect for the technology were flying around airports, public gatherings and other restricted areas. Even though things practically fly themselves they were crashing into people and their property. There were serious injuries because they were flown by morons.
So the FAA had to step in and become the gatekeeper.
Is crashing a drone into a person's car or a child the same as idiots on social media? No, but irresponsible use of social media has ruined plenty of people's lives. The connect isn't as obvious but the damage is still there.
We haven't started requiring social media licenses because speech is a protected right of course. And we shouldn't change that. But that means there should be some social responsibility.
However, the Wikipedia article seems to be accurate as far as I can tell from referenced sources--even if some other sources conflate AOL offering Usenet access beginning in, apparently, March 1994 with the September 1993 Eternal September date.
It'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.
I think that The Eternal September was the best thing to happen to The Internet.
It was when all those "tourists," in loud shirts, and straw hats, started wandering around, talking loudly, and throwing trash on the ground.
It was also when they brought money with them. Lots of money.
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.