Cultures & societies need some ability to uphold themselves, their distinctions & their norms. At least when newcomers came in waves (pre AOL era), there was some ability to prepare & make fast the ship, as September arrived. But having eternal flux, forever having new people come in who have no barriers, no rules, no culturation is a hard situation.
What do you see as the positive forces to keep things together? How do we keep the valuable community together & feeling cohesive, feeling a sense of community, under forever hard conditions? In this view, it's not about gatekeeping (an easy slur to levy imo), it's a real question, a real challenge; how does anything endure, how do we curate value & sense, when flux & incursion is the only constant?
There are a lot of people who simply don't respect the concept of tradition or the idea that something can be time tested. They feel that everything can simply be reasoned from first principles, which is tempting (particularly when young) but misguided.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Gatekeeping is an essential component of maintaining high standards.
Using arbitrary criteria is bad because it doesn't lead to high standards.
But with finely tuned criteria (e.g. using signals which actually do correlate with what you're trying to achieve) it's a powerful tool.
> Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African- Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
> Now, the segmentation can be total—you’re in or you’re out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial—anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.
> Now, this pulls against the cardinal programming virtue of ease of use, but ease of use is the wrong goal for social software. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction, toward the individual, when in fact, the user of a piece of social software is the group.
From A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) - Four Things To Design For
That's the point! The pressures of mass culture point ever TikTok-towards. If you want something else, you need to keep them out.
When a large group of people join a community and disregard/replace their values, that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term. The original community never consented to it.
Most people from that Usenet era were nerdy early 20 year olds who thought they were the shit (and in some aspects the were, but in others they weren’t). Some like Dave Fischer (who probably coined the term [1]) even thinks that they were wrong in preventing “the idiots” from coming in. The elitist attitude is the same whether you want people to conform to a specific etiquette when posting on Usenet or want specific people out of politics or positions of power because “we just don’t do things like that on the hill”.
1] https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wF4CpYb...
It's written declaratively, but that is no indication that it's true or right. IMHO communities do have a strong moral obligation to be open to outsiders: It is necessary to a functioning society, it reduces corruption, and it helps the outsider. Also, the community benefits from having new blood - it will wither and corrupt itself without it.
> that is morally equivalent to an invasion or colonization, for lack of a better term
Colonialism is not about outsiders coming inside, it's about power. If in the 19th century a bunch of people from southern Africa came to the UK, the UK wouldn't have been colonized (obviously). The southern Africans didn't have that power, and thus couldn't have used it to inflict the associated harms on the people in the UK. But the UK did have the power and did inflict the harms.
Citation badly needed
> It's written declaratively, but that is no indication that it's true or right.
You don't say...
And if HN didn't try to retain its identity, then we'd be adapting to people leaving "LOL" comments and extended pun chains.
Is that gatekeeping?
Oh please. Usenet had been routinely accepting new years since its inception. Even the phrase "Eternal September" is a reference to the regular influx of new users with every freshman college class getting Internet access for the first time.
Many Usenet groups were unmoderated and were vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. Introducing new Usenet users to FAQs and etiquette was important meta moderation. This ad-hoc community moderation had no control over actual group content besides bozo filters.
When AOL connected their users to Usenet it broke the ad-hoc community onboarding. A big problem with AOL's users specifically were they treated Usenet as an extension of AOL's chat rooms. It's little different if Discord or TikTok suddenly added a "join the conversation of Hacker News" button. A million teenagers would be a bit more moderation than even the mighty dang could handle.
It wasn't just that they were new, or idiots. It was that they were entitled new idiots.
The issue with the Eternal September was that AOL users suddenly got Usenet access, and the constant flood of new, un-acclimated users was too much for the existing users to handle.
Yes, I agree that there's still a degree of gatekeeping there, but communities have standards, and community standards (assuming they're good ones) are usually a great way to maintain civility and keep things on track and on topic.
Gatekeeping is bad. It might feel good when you're on the right side of the gate. It might even feel righteous. After all, you deserved it, by being in the in group. But gatekeeping on arbitrary criteria is always bad, and we diminish ourselves when we encourage it.
For me, the gatekeepers are worse for the Internet and it's communities than all the new people. It's great that the internet's gate is open. Let's celebrate that.