> 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?