this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.
Dunno if Reddit got its own Eternal September, but the one that I'm referring to was in 1993, predating Reddit by 12y. It was a huge influx of new internet users, specially evident in the Usenet. Wikipedia has a good article on that, but to keep it short: if you got a huge flood of newcomers at once, you aren't able to enforce the social norms of a place that keep it friendly and nice; instead the new users force the standard to be lowered.
Wild that Reddit's creation is closer to the start of the Eternal September than it is to today (19 years).
I agree that it's wild. And it's a bit bittersweet for me.
Usenet - and the old internet as a whole - were all about humans sharing stuff between themselves: I see something cool, I give you the link, you see something cool. While modern platforms try to remove the human from the equation, make them invisible: I see something cool, I "endorse" (upvote, like etc.) it, and that endorsement is used by some algorithm to automatically pick what you're supposed to be seeing.
Reddit is both and neither at the same time. The links are manually picked and shared, like in the old internet; but they're algorithmically sorted and ranked as in the new internet. It's like a product of the old internet trying to carve its way into the new internet, but never completely ditching its roots.
Perhaps that's why that site lasted so long. And I hope that one day we're going to say "a shame that it died".
The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?
Kind of - it doesn't happen "all" the time; it has a beginning, but no end.
If you consider it's the influx of new users, then yes, it does happen all the time. Do you have a different definition?
What's "eternal" in "Eternal September" is not the influx of new users, but rather the disruption of the social norms caused by a huge and sudden influx of new users.
That disruption started in 1993, and never ended. So it had a beginning but no end as of yet.