Reading this is like watching someone desecrate the grave of someone I cared about. The writer is very, very wrong about the facts, and should delete this post. Right from the beginning:

> For decades, internet culture has struggled with the n00bs. For generations, as new people entered the digital gates, there was an inevitable sneer that awaited them as they hit the onramp.

The struggle with the n00bs wasn't that we were sneering at them for being n00bs. The struggle was that n00bs were assholes. It wasn't their fault: they had never interacted with other people purely over text, and while they intellectually knew there were people on the other end of the line, they didn't viscerally feel that. Since they couldn't see people's reactions and feeling hurt, n00bs would say hurtful things to people online that they would never say to people in person.

Again, it's not their fault. Everyone was a n00b once, and most people remember the experience of saying something to someone, and only realizing later that you're being an asshole. I certainly did it.

But this had real consequences. People committed suicide due to what people said online. The saying was, "If you die on the internet, you die in real life." So when n00bs came online, we recognized that it was important that those n00bs learn to be kind, or be kicked out. This wasn't an elitist sneer at newcomers, it was telling people, "Hey, you can't be an asshole here just because you can't see the person you're talking to."

There was never a sense of superiority or gatekeeping that I remember: it was always coming from a place of, "Hey I made this mistake too, but you can't keep making it".

This happened yearly, each September, due to the influx of students accessing the internet for the first time through their college's computers. So each year, we had to teach people how to behave kindly online.

And it worked. By August of the next year, these communities were truly kind and friendly spaces. Spaces which are extremely difficult to find online now.

And again, this wasn't about gatekeeping. Part of the beauty of these spaces was that anyone could join, and the pace of people joining wasn't being enforced--it just organically happened to be slow enough that those people could be educated and integrated.

"Eternal September" occurred when AOL opened the floodgates to a steady, unrelenting stream of n00bs. There were upsides to this which I don't want to downplay, but for the communities which existed before this, it was an immediate and total annihilation. No longer could the experienced users teach the n00bs how to be kind online. There were simply too many n00bs, constantly.

Eternal September IS ongoing. There are still more n00bs coming online and being assholes to each other because they don't recognize that there's another person on the other end of the line. People are still committing suicide due to what people say to them online. And in addition to the n00bs, there's now a vast backlog of experienced users who have never learned to not be assholes online. The internet is generally not a kind place.

And it's honestly pretty fucked up that some people will remember our internet history this way. "You can't be an asshole here" isn't a sneer on the onramp. It's not the same as gatekeeping. In fact, being mean to n00bs or gatekeeping are directly antithetical to what we were trying to do back then.