When AOL first created its portal to Usenet newsgroups in the 1990s, there was a similar effect.
Re:Why Not to Use Quora
by stickfigure on Monday December 10, 2018 @11:25AM
(#18648975)
Very true. Funny anecdote:
I used to be an avid reader of alt.best-of-internet. When AOL put newsgroups online, alt.best-of-internet was at the top of the alphabetical list and suddenly got a deluge of nonsense. Please to AOL went unheard.
Someone got the brilliant idea to keep a thread bumped to the top whose title was:
OFFICIAL MESSAGE FROM AOL: WE WORSHIP SATAN
I don't know if this was cause/effect, but shortly afterwards alt.best-of-internet was hidden or moved to a less conspicuous location in the UI and the deluge stopped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
What happened in India was from mid-2016 usable internet access became super cheap. This suddenly added at least a hundred million new users to the Internet in a short span of time, people who were being exposed to totally new communities beyond their facebook friend circle. This is not about India, this happens whenever there is a clash between new users and old users and the number of new users is overwhelmingly larger than the old ones. This should have happened when China started getting internet, but I guess their government policies coupled with less number of English speakers than India prevented it. But this is not the last time this is happening. After the Indians settle down, I guess next will be Africa and we will start again.