| ▲ | rdevilla 3 hours ago |
| Facebook was the Eternal September of the Web. Netiquette died when it was made generally available, as did the culture that spawned it. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think you can tell approximately how old someone is by when they believe Eternal September started on the internet. Nobody believes it was when they started enjoying the internet. It was always when some other generation or service arrived after them. The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along. |
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| ▲ | ghurtado 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So many words and you missed the most important one: "netiquette" That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't. Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use should realize that it would have been impossible for the term to be coined in 2026. If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly. > Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along. You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not. | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can confirm. Source: I was a bad, bad, boi, on UseNet. | |
| ▲ | rdevilla 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hence... "of the web." IRC is and always was a cesspool but at least they had heard of netiquette, and it was something you could choose to partake in - or not, for the lulz. Nobody said anything about being "calm and well behaved" in particular. | |
| ▲ | plagiarist 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Eternal September started before I was on the internet, but there have been several similar shifts since then. It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot. |
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| ▲ | h2zizzle 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| As a Millennial, I'm sad to say that it wasn't even older generations' fault, but our own (+Gen X). The tipping point was letting in normies who traded in photos and money instead of text and art. |
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| ▲ | rdevilla 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora. LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures. I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English. | | |
| ▲ | h2zizzle an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one (forum of) fora. I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation. Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out of a web experience. You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month, because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich web wasn't that rich yet. You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many other forms of media and so many other institutions into Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't work online. Until they did. | | | |
| ▲ | ghurtado 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were... You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a very different meaning. This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing: Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and people who didn't, that's it. I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image. "Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you understand why I can no longer be a priest" Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not the 40k one. | |
| ▲ | foobarian 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And Greek! Don't forget Greek -emacs user | |
| ▲ | iugtmkbdfil834 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I mean, one can always get an older machine and code everything as holy binary chant not only impress the youngsters, but also impose level of distance from the 'limited by llms'. FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing the original languages to studying scripture. | |
| ▲ | echelon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures. Capital and tech improvement will beat anyone chasing that. |
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