Eternal September

• eternal September

Before the Internet became mainstream in the mid-1990s, Usenet was largely restricted to colleges and universities, meaning that September (the start of the academic year) represented the largest annual influx of new users. Around 1993, commercial ISPs began offering Usenet access to their userbases, leading to a large amount of new posters with little idea of netiquette joining year-round. From the perspective of experienced Usenet users, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.

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Eternal September or the Eternal September

1. (Internet slang, historical) A period beginning around 1993, in which large amounts of new users were joining Usenet. [from 1994]

   Synonyms: Endless September, never-ending September, September that never ended

   • 1994 February 9, John William Chambless, “The Eternal September”, in alt.flame‎^[1] (Usenet):
   • 1994 April 17, Ziegler, “HERO: Star Wars in 1995”, in rec.arts.comics.misc‎^[2] (Usenet):

     I've only been here since the start of the Eternal September, but I was on at the beginning of that whole mess with the Highs.

   • 2007 November 16, Charles Arthur, “A filter for stupidity?”, in Alan Rusbridger, editor, The Guardian‎^[3], London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 9 January 2014:

     Certainly the arrival of Eternal September also brought spam, both on Usenet and in email, because the spammers realised that there were a growing number of people who were stupid enough to believe their promises of pharmaceutical or financial wonders.

   • 2015 September 30, Jason Koebler, “It's September, Forever”, in Vice‎^[4]:

     "September 1993 will go down in net history as the September that never ended," Dave Fischer wrote on the world's most popular social network at the time. That post spawned the idea of the "Eternal September," a phenomenon that happens when an internet community is forced to deal with a neverending influx of new people.

   • 2025 October 20, Benjamin Hart, quoting Cory Doctorow, “The Internet Doesn’t Have to Suck”, in Intelligencer‎^[5], New York, N.Y.: New York Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 7 December 2025:

     I like the thing that we did where we made it much easier for everyday people to use it, and lots of people got to join the party. I’m really glad about that. I’m not one of these Eternal September people, angry that normal people use the internet now.

Eternal September

1. (Internet slang) This term needs a definition. Please help out and add a definition, then remove the text {{rfdef}}.
   • 2013 August 4, Katherine Rosman, “Some Twitter Users Push Back on Ads”, in The Wall Street Journal‎^[6], New York, N.Y.: Dow Jones & Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 8 December 2025:

     "Twitter can feel cheesy sometimes, so promotional and self-aggrandizing," says John Manoogian III, a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco who joined Twitter in 2006, its inaugural year. "It's experiencing Eternal September," he says, using the Internet slang for when something becomes overcome by the masses. He says that he and other purists are finding refuge in Weird Twitter.

   • 2019 August 8, Anna Wiener, “The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News”, in The New Yorker‎^[7], New York, N.Y.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 8 August 2019:

     For decades, the phrase “Eternal September” has been used to describe the tipping point for a message board or online community—the inclusion, or invasion, of new users who dramatically change the existing subculture. […] The creation of Startup News was a response to Reddit’s Eternal September; […] The tech industry as a whole is having its own Eternal September.

   • 2022 September 1, A.T. Murray, “Desperately seeking Sebald before Eternal September of Mentifex”, in alt.folklore.computers‎^[8] (Usenet), archived from the original on 7 December 2022