People talk about "Eternal September" in regards to the web as if to imply that all of the cool, interesting smart people were on the web in the early 1990s, and that the culture of the internet rightly belonged to those people alone, and that everyone who joined afterwards were part of the web's degradation and downfall. It's typical for people to draw an imaginary line in the sand of cultures or subcultures they care about and believe that everything that came before them was better than everything that came after.
They're right in a particularly narrow-minded way that only considers the "modern web" to be the public feed on Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter, and corporate sites and the effect of SEO. But it's also the case that the quality of content on the modern web far surpasses that of the early web because so many more people, representing a greater diversity of cultures and ideas, are on it and able to express themselves.
So if that's "Eternal September" then I think it can be argued that it was as much evolution as devolution.
> "People talk about 'Eternal September' as if to imply ... that the culture of the internet rightly belonged to those people alone, and that everyone who joined afterwards were part of the web's degradation and downfall".
Yes, that is exactly correct. The people who made the web, and built a beautiful space were the 'rightful owners'. A few outsize capitalists then saw that they could extract value from this made world -- and make themselves rich -- by encouraging and enabling colonization of that once peaceable space. It was a form of cultural theft and appropriation -- indirect through corporate marketing and lawyers.
If we follow the argument of 'diversity everywhere', no culture could be any culture anywhere because it would "lack diversity". One grey world is not a win.
The existing pre-93 culture was wholly supplanted and destroyed by the "new and improved" "higher quality" culture that replaced it. Of course, that estimation of 'better' and 'higher' is evaluate from the mindset of the colonizers -- not at all from the perspective of whomever came before.
Moreover, its not just the corporate profiteering -- that just opened the door for all of the colonizers. It is all of the self righteous fake "representative" identity virtue signaling that goes with it. Capitalism and wall street corporate profits enabled an entire world of trolls -- who then use the claim of colonization on others to hide their own prior actions in kind. And this is an improvement?
