There was a Duty Officer rotation for the O-5 (Commander) officers on the USS Blue Ridge in the late 1990's.
The 0-6 promotion list was out one September, and they had fun with a certain Captain-to-be with a monstrous ego, who was quite excited to be off the rotation.
They put his name down for 31-September.
As expected, he achieved low Earth orbit in his rage over the affront.
Another entry for "things which make one feel old" (it definitely is a reference to that, and it absolutely needs explaining, but...), especially because:
a) I can't imagine more than a single-digit percentage of people on here were on Usenet, and
b) this is _exactly_ the sort of place which will have a wildly disproportionate number of old Usenet denizens; most places that single-digit percentage would be more like 0.0x% at most. (Other candidates; Dreamwidth, I reckon, probably Tumblr, and anyone who still unironically uses mailing lists).
In the earlyish 2000s, I gave a talk once to a bunch of more senior academics at the institution I was working at, the central thesis of which was "in about five years, you're gonna start getting undergraduates who have never known of a world where they couldn't cheat on their homework by cribbing Wikipedia".
This was a true – arguably, even insightful – observation at the time, but in retrospect, it's a charmingly quaint view of the future compared to where we are with ChatGPT. Eternal September is the same kind of deal; it contemplated the future through the lens of the present and, well, it _sort_ of got there, but it kind of missed the full existential horror of "your grandmother on Facebook".
I wonder how much work it would be to change it to September[1] of 2007[1]
I hope 1993 is not hardcoded.
It would also be great to have a calendar where every year past 1993 contains just one day that is conveniently September 3rd[3]. 1993 should start normally but September 3rd should be the last day.
Already does that-- `sdate --covid 19` will keep it perpetually March 2020. It also accepts arbitrary starting points with `--epoch`.
Not sure how you'd do a perpetual 2020 while allowing the month to advance-- pretty simple if you keep the month as a number, I suppose, but problematic for the named months used in the examples (what should the 44th month of a year be named?).
AOL was the death knell for USENET when they joined up. At that point there was a high barrier to entry for USENET but the bar got removed completely. A sad day.
I must confess that I directly participated, aided and abetted Eternal September.
By summer 1992, I had landed my first-ever job with InterNIC Information Services. They were part of a trio (with the obscure Database Services and the notorious Registration Services by Network Solutions). IS's mission was to serve as a clearinghouse for information to the Research and Education communities who comprised the Internet in the early 90s. My crumudgeonly supervisor had an MLS degree.
Of course, due to our (800) toll-free number being published by a few very annoying national media outlets, our scope crept into the consumer dialup market. Thereafter, my job duties consisted chiefly of pulling every voicemail message as quickly as humanly possible, then photocopying or printing via SPARCprinter a document known as PDIAL, and then quickly cramming it into an envelope or FAX machine, then probably either rebooting the SPARC machine to unjam the printer, or going to listen to more voicemails.
PDIAL was a compendium of all known methods for getting onto the Information Superhighway at up to 14.4Kbit/s. Of course it included AOL and all the other walled garden, pseudo-ISPs.
So if you ever meet someone who pioneered the commercialized, privatized Internet in 1992-93, I may have been the dude who gave them directions.
"Eternal September" has big "I can't believe they let those people into the country club" energy.
Gatekeeping is bad. It might feel good when you're on the right side of the gate. It might even feel righteous. After all, you deserved it, by being in the in group. But gatekeeping on arbitrary criteria is always bad, and we diminish ourselves when we encourage it.
For me, the gatekeepers are worse for the Internet and it's communities than all the new people. It's great that the internet's gate is open. Let's celebrate that.
A community has no moral obligation to accommodate outsiders with different values. Rather, the outsider has a moral obligation to adopt the values of the community if they want to join.
When a large group of people join a community and disregard/replace their values, that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term. The original community never consented to it.
It’s not a community in the sense of a small town community or an actual country club.
Most people from that Usenet era were nerdy early 20 year olds who thought they were the shit (and in some aspects the were, but in others they weren’t). Some like Dave Fischer (who probably coined the term [1]) even thinks that they were wrong in preventing “the idiots” from coming in. The elitist attitude is the same whether you want people to conform to a specific etiquette when posting on Usenet or want specific people out of politics or positions of power because “we just don’t do things like that on the hill”.
> A community has no moral obligation to accommodate outsiders with different values. Rather, the outsider has a moral obligation to adopt the values of the community if they want to join.
It's written declaratively, but that is no indication that it's true or right. IMHO communities do have a strong moral obligation to be open to outsiders: It is necessary to a functioning society, it reduces corruption, and it helps the outsider. Also, the community benefits from having new blood - it will wither and corrupt itself without it.
> that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term
Colonialism is not about outsiders coming inside, it's about power. If in the 19th century a bunch of people from southern Africa came to the UK, the UK wouldn't have been colonized (obviously). The southern Africans didn't have that power, and thus couldn't have used it to inflict the associated harms on the people in the UK. But the UK did have the power and did inflict the harms.
> It is necessary to a functioning society, it reduces corruption, and it helps the outsider. Also, the community benefits from having new blood - it will wither and corrupt itself without it.
Citation badly needed
> It's written declaratively, but that is no indication that it's true or right.
I recall just the other month when there was much bemoaning and gnashing of teeth about how former reddit people were showing up here in more significant numbers than the general trickle previously and the comments along the line responding to new users leaving 'lol' as the entirety of the comment "this is not Reddit - comments and contributions are expected to be significant or constructive."
And if HN didn't try to retain its identity, then we'd be adapting to people leaving "LOL" comments and extended pun chains.
I think in this case it's a bit more nuanced. I don't think the Usenet denizens of old were against new members. September usually brought an influx of new users when university freshmen would start school (at the time, many people's first introduction to the internet was when they got a connection at their university). It would be a bit of work, but over the next couple months the old-timers would acclimate the newcomers to Usenet etiquette, and all would be well.
The issue with the Eternal September was that AOL users suddenly got Usenet access, and the constant flood of new, un-acclimated users was too much for the existing users to handle.
Yes, I agree that there's still a degree of gatekeeping there, but communities have standards, and community standards (assuming they're good ones) are usually a great way to maintain civility and keep things on track and on topic.
> But gatekeeping on arbitrary criteria is always bad, and we diminish ourselves when we encourage it.
Oh please. Usenet had been routinely accepting new years since its inception. Even the phrase "Eternal September" is a reference to the regular influx of new users with every freshman college class getting Internet access for the first time.
Many Usenet groups were unmoderated and were vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. Introducing new Usenet users to FAQs and etiquette was important meta moderation. This ad-hoc community moderation had no control over actual group content besides bozo filters.
When AOL connected their users to Usenet it broke the ad-hoc community onboarding. A big problem with AOL's users specifically were they treated Usenet as an extension of AOL's chat rooms. It's little different if Discord or TikTok suddenly added a "join the conversation of Hacker News" button. A million teenagers would be a bit more moderation than even the mighty dang could handle.
Most of us encountered conversations where some AOL dickhead threatened to get some Usenet person's account revoked because they didn't understand they weren't in their walled garden anymore.
It wasn't just that they were new, or idiots. It was that they were entitled new idiots.
I generally like embracing the new & novel, leaving the door open. But also I can easily see: places without gates are subject to tragedy of the commons.
Cultures & societies need some ability to uphold themselves, their distinctions & their norms. At least when newcomers came in waves (pre AOL era), there was some ability to prepare & make fast the ship, as September arrived. But having eternal flux, forever having new people come in who have no barriers, no rules, no culturation is a hard situation.
What do you see as the positive forces to keep things together? How do we keep the valuable community together & feeling cohesive, feeling a sense of community, under forever hard conditions? In this view, it's not about gatekeeping (an easy slur to levy imo), it's a real question, a real challenge; how does anything endure, how do we curate value & sense, when flux & incursion is the only constant?
The attempted conversion of gatekeeping into a slur (it's not - it simply refers to upholding standards) is in fact an attack on the concept of tradition in general.
There are a lot of people who simply don't respect the concept of tradition or the idea that something can be time tested. They feel that everything can simply be reasoned from first principles, which is tempting (particularly when young) but misguided.
100% agreed. Chesterton's fence[0] is a foreign concept to them. After all, how could those archaic morons in the past without our advanced technology have possibly landed on a better solution than the one some friends and I came up with but haven't yet put into practice?
If we extend the metaphor of a gate, then gatekeeping prevents the introduction of evolutionary bottlenecks, meaning the population stagnates in the absence of any external pressure to mutate.
... and we write this on a site that has resisted becoming a "modern" social media site.
> Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African- Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
> Now, the segmentation can be total—you’re in or you’re out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial—anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
> Now, this pulls against the cardinal programming virtue of ease of use, but ease of use is the wrong goal for social software. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction, toward the individual, when in fact, the user of a piece of social software is the group.
Certainly not all gatekeeping is good, and not all community standards are good. But some unquestionably are, and "opening your gate" and allowing people to ignore good standards is a great way to destroy a community.
Quite the opposite, gatekeeping behavior evolved because societies that gatekeep are more evolutionarily successful than those that don't. It is to multi-multi-cellular organisms (that is, social groups) what immune systems are for multi-cellular organisms.
> then gatekeeping prevents the introduction of evolutionary bottlenecks, meaning the population stagnates in the absence of any external pressure to mutate.
That's the point! The pressures of mass culture point ever TikTok-towards. If you want something else, you need to keep them out.
It has everything to do with nostalgia. Nostalgia is the only reason you can even express a concept as nebulous as "online freedom," when hardly anyone in the current generation can even conceptualize what that means, nevermind how it's lacking in TikTok, or why they would desire it in the first place. Waxing nostalgic for the "online freedom" of usenet is no different than extolling the virtues of "hard work" that are lost on those damn kids nowadays who don't even need to hike up a snowy hill to get to school.
Hi, I've never used Usenet not TikTok. I would take Usenet over TikTok any day of the week. That's not nostalgia. That's Usenet being more compatible with my values as an individual than TikTok.
Welp, the gatekeepers lost / won depending on how you look at it. There was no stopping the internet of course, but Usenet fell into irrelevance somewhere along the line. Which is I guess, getting their wish?
It strikes me that "Eternal September" is an older generations version of "Enshittification" — an expression of the same anxiety about change, the same entitlement to have everything stay the same.
If a restaurant raises it's prices in an inflationary environment, is it enshittification? You know, the restaurant you've been able to buy a $6.50 burger and fries with for the last 10 years now costs $8. Am I, the customer, being abused?
"Abusing users" in eshittification is fundamentally about violating expectations/norms, which is what Eternal September was about. Before "Eternal September", Usenet users came aboard in small waves and acclimatized to the local culture. This was the norm on Usenet. Once Usenet opened up, users joined so quickly that they could participate in the network with no shame without acclimatizing to the local culture. Likewise, when more ads appear or previously-free API surfaces begin costing users, older norms/expectations have been violated.
Enshittification ensues on platforms/services with a captive audience - whether it is due to network effects, switching costs or retraining costs. It is especially prevalent where there is a growth imperative followed by a profitability imperative (e.g. VC funded companies which first need to grow to get funded and then need to secure an exit).
Usually a restaurant neither has a captive audience nor a growth imperative (unless it is a PE-owned chain restaurant).
Thinking about this analogy further, where captive restaurants do exist their prices probably meet the definition of enshittified. Cruise ships, movie theaters, stadiums, concerts, etc.
How about the sole grocery store or Dollar General type store in a rural area? Same thing. As I said in a sibling comment down below, having your expectations violated isn't some form of personality flaw. Changes in behavior and pricing put real pressure on individuals to change their behavior, which can put stress on individuals who were already stressed. I'm merely describing what I feel is the emotional reaction behind this sentiment, not weighing in on whether it's good or bad.
It's not like by adding a moniker on this phenomenon ("enshittification") or by upvoting or downvoting arguments we agree with that we can change the phenomenon anyway; pricing and economics are a distributed exercise.
You're getting downvoted because it's clear you simply don't comprehend the arguments you're allegedly responding to and are projecting your own straw men to make your (non-)points.
I'm curious what the purpose of your comment is, to further sneer at me out of disagreement? HN's culture has been steadily changing from one of operators to one of users for a long time now. I knew this would be an unpopular sentiment. Though my comment did go up and then down, so it's obviously a controversial one.
It's also not wrong to feel angry when expectations change. If a Dollar General in your area raises prices, it puts pressure on local residents who may have just barely been staying solvent. Through no fault of their own, those residents now have even more financial stress on them. This is why economics is a complicated field; things like interest rate regimes have broad knock-on effects on the economy and create winners and losers that under different regimes may have never emerged.
"Eternal September" was to (non-commercial) 1990s email what "Enshittification" was to the web or online platforms in the 2020s, with monetization (via personalized advertising and recommendations).
"Eternal September" was not about monetization, only about the declining level of technical clue among (college-student) internet users; it wasn't about (commercial email) spam either.
The 0-6 promotion list was out one September, and they had fun with a certain Captain-to-be with a monstrous ego, who was quite excited to be off the rotation.
They put his name down for 31-September.
As expected, he achieved low Earth orbit in his rage over the affront.
MORAL: date math is hard.