

It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended. - iamelgringo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

======
zach
Eternal September has become a pattern of mass interaction, especially on the
net. It's why we have News.YC, after all: the Eternal September of Reddit.

The problem is fundamentally content overload, but that goes hand-in-hand with
decrease in average quality. Quality, in an absolute sense, may increase, but
it's overwhelmed by ignorance and mediocrity. So there needs to be filtering
on the content lifecycle.

Filtering right up front is very effective, but bad for business. Take Google
Answers. You had to pay money (mostly) to ask a question and few were allowed
to answer them. Extremely high average quality content for what was there, but
where are they now? Compare that, of course, with its polar opposite Yahoo
Answers. It was never even August there!

But the internet's native model is to eliminate any constraint on generating
content. That's why Eternal September was so grievous -- it's when that
philosophy got mugged by the reality of induhviduals, spam, crazy people and
the sheer volume of mundanity.

It was also when people realized that the potential of the internet was
rapidly approaching. But okay, given Eternal September as a reality of content
generation (don't try to set up walled gardens), what do you do? You bust out
the best tools you can for dealing with it -- the PageRank, the groups, the
tags, the voting, the social connections. And people seem to enjoy the
internet again. And I think some money was made along the way.

So is it more interesting that Eternal September was the end of the golden age
for the elite or the birth of a golden age for the mainstream?

~~~
simianstyle
Crazy idea - but perhaps news.ycombinator should have limited registrations. I
wonder what the outcome of that would be.

~~~
zach
Leaving aside the question of whether filtering users upfront is desirable,
you don't need to simply limit registration. There are a lot of intermediate
steps you can take.

MetaFilter is a classic example of reasonable but comparatively high barriers
to registration: $5 for an account and you have to wait a week to post. Seems
very clever, but I'm not a MeFi regular, so I'm not sure how well that's
worked out.

~~~
jazj
I think paid barriers to entry just amplify the positive or negative effects
of other administrative measures; in and of themselves, all they do is reduce
the rate of people coming in without much affecting its make-up. It doesn't
even work that well for filtering out teenagers any more with the advent of
prepaid gift cards (and before that they could just ask the 'rents to stump up
the cash anyway).

I say that paid barriers don't do that much good or bad themselves based on
the fact that on MeFi they seem to have been an asset whereas on, say,
Something Awful they seem to've just turned the place into an echo chamber,
and on Kuro5hin all it's done is drive the site further into stagnation. Paid
barriers aren't risk-free either; it makes account gaming even more fun and
makes your site a juicier target for attacks, especially if it means you end
up storing people's personal details.

------
fiaz
I think this is a very relevant article to the "Eternal September" story:

<http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

What's surprising is that some of the group dynamics that contribute to the
break down of online communities was identified in the oddest of settings
decades ago...

------
Tichy
Seems to me the problem of news.yc, if there is one, so far would not be too
many irrelevant submissions, but rather, not enough interesting submissions.
Can we really expect dozens of stellar submissions every day, though? Maybe
there are not even that many interesting new things relevant to hacker news
happening in the world every day.

------
Prrometheus
Ironically, this post refers to itself.

------
jazj
Of course "the September that never ended" ended two years ago. So this post
appears to be not only a non sequitur but also self-contradictory.

~~~
randallsquared
"Of course "the September that never ended" ended two years ago."

How so?

~~~
jazj
Fair point. It was actually three years ago:

"On February 9, 2005, AOL discontinued newsgroup access through its service
(this was announced on January 25, 2005[6][7])."

~~~
iamelgringo
I actually found that comment a little ironic, because I thought that AOL
itself died pretty much when they bought Time Warner.

