[Aurornis]

I think you can tell approximately how old someone is by when they believe Eternal September started on the internet. Nobody believes it was when they started enjoying the internet. It was always when some other generation or service arrived after them.

The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before Facebook arrived. The original “Eternal September” was in the early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Can confirm.

Source: I was a bad, bad, boi, on UseNet.

[ghurtado]

So many words and you missed the most important one: "netiquette"

That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't.

Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use should realize that it would have been impossible for the term to be coined in 2026.

If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly.

> Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long before Facebook came along.

You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not.

[plagiarist]

Eternal September started before I was on the internet, but there have been several similar shifts since then.

It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects. Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle obviously written by a robot.

[rdevilla]

Hence... "of the web." IRC is and always was a cesspool but at least they had heard of netiquette, and it was something you could choose to partake in - or not, for the lulz. Nobody said anything about being "calm and well behaved" in particular.