It’s about the size of the network, not the size of the Internet. There are many community networks that run atop the Internet. Each one will have an eternal September if they move from niche to popularity and have their culture changed. In fact this phenomenon isn’t even new to the Internet. As companies or countries grow many bemoan about how “the organization just isn’t what it used to be” while ignoring that this is kind of the “success” state where others are coming in and contributing their own piece of it.

The whole idea of a culture being a static thing that shouldn't change has always seemed rather shortsighted to me. What people are complaining about is that it's changing fast enough for them to notice before they've become crotchety old people (who always complain about the youth...). People act like cultural identity is so tied to these traditions that if you took their grandpatenys and introduced them to their own ancestors from 10 generations back that all their traditions would be the same. My guess is that they would both be aghast at what each other does, for different reasons.

The internet is just a continuation of this, in myriad different subgroups with their own norms, and like everyone else, they don't like change (but usually only when it inconveniences or is easily extrapolated to situations they see to do with themselves).

It's not about culture being a static thing. It's about culture existing or not. Culture is the reproduction of something through multiple people being replaced.

The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing, because it no longer could. Its replication rate was too low. Those who carried the culture could not make it "go viral" anymore. So it died.

> It's not about culture being a static thing. It's about culture existing or not.

All the people coming in have their own idea of the appropriate way to act. It's not an entire lack of culture, it's a hundred different ones all clamoring and drowning out the original. Eventually, if the group has enough of a shared reason for being, it will settle into a new culture. If there isn't a shared reason and it's large enough, an enveloping culture and subgroups might develop. Just look at Twitter, or Reddit, and probably Facebook.

> Culture is the reproduction of something through multiple people being replaced.

Yes, but it's never reproduced perfectly. There's drift over time, and some aspects are lost, some gained, and yet others altered in fundamental ways.

> The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing

Sometimes it was lost, but sometimes it was just diluted. I suspect most the time it was the latter. If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.

> Those who carried the culture could not make it "go viral" anymore. So it died.

It was never viral in the sense of what that word means for memes (as ideas, not necessarily cat gifs) as we apply it to the internet. It was an indoctrination. Some of it was meme, where people learned as they saw, but much of it was people actively enforcing the culture on any that came.

There is a lot in common with people in the U.S. worried about immigrants changing their own culture, which they see as "American" (even though there's been wildly different ideas of what that is for a long time, regardless of what TV would have us believe much of the time). Lots of people coming in from outside and changing what they view as "normal" behavior. "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", Spanish on legal forms, etc.

Those people are worried about the exact same thing the people that lament Eternal September complain about, outsiders coming in and changing what's considered the norm. But here's the thing, if enough of them actually cared and thought it was worse, they could (and let's be honest, most eventually did) just migrate to different more exclusive or less popular groups that more more aligned with how they wanted to interact with people.

The question is, is that perfectly fine and expected, and people that want to preserve a culture should make their own effort to do so, and if it fails that means the culture in question has outrun its value, or should everyone else be required to adopt someone else's culture just because those already of that culture have staked a claim somewhere and view others as outsiders attacking or hurting their culture?

Personally I think the former is the only feasible solution. I'm willing to accept that may make me unhappy at times. HN is moderated, so it's somewhat protected by this, but if hundreds of thousands of new accounts were created in the next year and they all thought that dick jokes were the height of discourse and the moderators couldn't keep up, well I'd lament the HN that used to be, and also start looking for somewhere new. I'd like to think I'd be open minded enough to not blame those people (as long as it wasn't a concerted effort to ignore the rules, and instead just too many new people to adequately inform of the culture here), but that wouldn't change the reality.

Or maybe it would be something less outlandish, such as the careful balance between VC techbro people and interesting hackers and lurking forum philosophers getting too far out of wack and the one or more of those groups getting too much influence/people and HN becomes no longer is more than the sum of it's parts to me (and maybe many others). It's easy to point at HN and say it also has a culture, but I think more accurately it has a few cultures, which large shared components enforced by the mods. Maybe an influx of people wouldn't be so much the erasure of culture as much as the ballooning of one over the others. I'm sure there were people in the original Eternal September forums that thought the current culture an ill fit, and perhaps they saw that influx of people as like minds coming to their subgroup?

> > The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing

> Sometimes it was lost, but sometimes it was just diluted. I suspect most the time it was the latter.

No, it just stopped existing. You can't go find it somewhere or anything.

> If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.

That's not how anything works.

> There is a lot in common with people in the U.S. worried about immigrants changing their own culture, which they see as "American"

Not really, because those people are worried about an immigrant minority, not worried about an immigrant supermajority.

You would do better to look at the same example in the opposite way: immigrant parents worried that their children will become native English speakers and lose the family language and traditions.

>> If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.

> That's not how anything works.

As long as there's some population left continuing the practice, if it's beneficial and can be proven (and the cost benefit is what people consider to beneficial), then it can and will come back. Breastfeeding rates dropped to 28% in the 1970s due to various reasons. There's been a resurgence for many reasons.

> Not really, because those people are worried about an immigrant minority, not worried about an immigrant supermajority.

That is, most definitely, what some people are worried about, whether there's any validity to that worry or not. Have you never heard the "poor immigrants have so many children that they'll outnumber us soon" racist statements? That are just an extrapolation and extreme version of that thought.

> You would do better to look at the same example in the opposite way: immigrant parents worried that their children will become native English speakers and lose the family language and traditions.

I did look at it that way, in my original comment.

OK, "worried about" is the wrong word, let's say "responding with worry to."

It will never end because new users come online to use it in completely different ways than prior generations of users. Even when everyone on earth is touching the internet, there is biological churn.

As a personal example, I've never used a Discord but see references to it everywhere online and am vaguely aware of what it is (IRC to me). Generally, I don't get why chatting is so interesting and I'm only interested in async communication methods.

Well, discord is async. You come and go and respond whenever you want to.

It's the same as old IM/chat room applications. The big difference being that it allows voice chat if you want it and some embedded file sharing.

Voice chat is another level of “why do I need that” in my mind for me personally. I’m actually surprised younger generations are interested in that given they won’t even make a phone call to order a pizza. It’s for talking smack on video games I suppose.

Internet culture has changed permanently.

This statement of yours will be complete if someone weighs in to disagree, attack you and finishes by flagging your comment.

Once we're done with that, we can move on to the real substance and start arguing about which one of us is more like Hitler.

And then let the algorithms amplify the most infuriating of those arguments.

Time for some advert injection.

It will continue to change, as all things tend to do.