Eternal September: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''Summer has come and passed
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Back in the old days, few people could access [[The Internet]], even if they'd somehow heard of it and wanted to access it in the first place. One of the few groups that ''could'' was college students: universities were among the very first Internet adopters, and college-affiliated people, especially students, were one of the main demographic groups on the Internet through the first half of [[The Nineties]].
The upshot was that every September, there would be a large influx of new users: college students accessing the Internet for the first time. These newbies were not privy to the manners and folkways of Internet discussion, let alone the technical side of it. Established netizens took it upon themselves to teach the n00bs the netiquette, and within a few months the Internet would go back to being a place for sensible and intelligent discussion.<ref>[[Hilarious in Hindsight|Stop laughing.]] We may not have had BitTorrent or [[Twitter]], but the early Internet had its charms: spam hadn't been invented yet, and [[
Then, in 1993, AOL opened up the then-dominant [[Fora|forum]] of the 'net, [[UseNet]], to ''every'' customer, and Usenet was overrun. The social structure that had worked fine to incorporate a relative handful of newcomers was ineffective in a world where the newcomers vastly outnumbered the old guard. Worse, for every newbie that could be civilized or driven off, more and more took their place immediately. This is the Eternal September, the age the Internet now lives in; most of the old guard are gone, vanished, or formed more minor net societies within the larger Internet as a whole.
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* [[Bastard Operator From Hell]]
* [[The Journal Entries]] of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et al.
* [[Kibo
* The earliest [[Legion of Net.Heroes]] stories. (An issue of Dvandom Force featured the "Newbie Syndicate of Earth-September.")
* [[Undocumented Features]]
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