Today is the 4000th day of the September that never ended.
In the early days of Usenet, there was a core consituency of some academics, some people who worked for enlightened companies, and some customers of very early ISPs like world.std.com and netcom.com. But a very large percentage of the users were students, and so every September we were inundated with first year students, newbies who didn’t understand Usenet, its culture, or indeed that every word they posted was being looked at by people all around the world who were saying “what a moron”. After a month or two, 99.99% of the newbies would get a clue and either leave or settle down to be regular members of our little family.
But September 1993 changed that – that was about the time when large formerly isolated glorified bulletin-board systems like Compuserve and AOL burst upon Usenet. These people had “matured” their style on their own systems with their own mores and ettiquette, and didn’t seem to realize that Usenet was a different place and a different culture. Nor did most of them care.
Usenet has not been as nice a place since then. My apologies to the people who joined since then who are good contributors, but for every one of you there are 100 snuhers, freedom knights, spammers, and kooks.