Eternal September: The First Internet Flood

In September 1993, something broke on the Internet. Not technically, but culturally. Until then, online spaces like Usenet1 had their own rhythms.

Each September, a new wave of college freshmen would log in for the first time, stumble through the arcane rituals of netiquette, and gradually learn the ropes. By October, the storm usually calmed, and the community returned to its self-regulated order.

Then came America Online.2 AOL opened the floodgates, connecting millions of everyday users to Usenet with a single click. Unlike the annual drip of students, this was a deluge that never ended. September 1993 did not stop in October. It became an Eternal September.

The Shockwave of Newcomers

Usenet was not built for mass adoption. The existing users were scholars, hackers, hobbyists, the kind who read RFCs and argued about standards for fun. They shared unwritten codes: trim your quotes, do not spam, lurk before posting, and respect hierarchies of knowledge.

“Communities are fragile. They can be ruined by growth, yet they cannot survive without it.” — Howard Rheingold

AOL users arrived with none of this context. They brought mainstream habits: casual chat, advertising, flame wars, and off-topic jokes. To veterans, it felt like graffiti on a library’s walls. What had once been a niche intellectual commons turned into something noisy and unruly.

But this was not sabotage. It was scale. The Internet had crossed a threshold from subculture to mass culture.

Lessons for Today’s Startups

Three decades later, startups face their own Eternal Septembers whenever their product suddenly scales. Think of Discord servers after a viral TikTok mention, or a SaaS tool that lands on the front page of Hacker News. Communities that once felt tight-knit can suddenly feel overwhelmed. The Eternal September story holds valuable lessons:

  1. Onboarding is culture-shaping. Veteran Usenet users assumed newcomers would eventually “figure it out.” At scale, that is a false hope. Startups need deliberate onboarding rituals: guides, norms, and friction that set cultural tone early.
  2. Guardrails protect the commons. Unmoderated Usenet suffered from spam and noise. Platforms today need clear moderation frameworks and community managers. Without them, bad behavior becomes the norm.
  3. Old-timers will not always win. Many Usenet regulars left, unable to adapt to the new culture. Startups must accept that scale changes the identity of their community. Growth is not preservation. Growth is evolution.
  4. Norms travel slowly. AOL users did not adopt “netiquette”3 overnight. Behavior patterns spread socially, not instantly. Tools like nudges, templates, and default behaviors can reinforce norms far better than stern warnings.

Feature, Not a Bug

“Eternal September has come to mean not just a date in history, but a condition of permanent disruption.” — Clay Shirky

What felt like a catastrophe to early netizens was, in hindsight, a turning point. Eternal September signaled the Internet’s mainstreaming. The messy expansion laid the groundwork for today’s social platforms, from Reddit to Twitter to Discord.

For founders, the metaphor is clear, “the moment your product hits mainstream, the culture you built in private beta will fracture.” That is not failure. It is the beginning of something else. The real challenge is to design communities that survive the flood without losing their essence.

  1. USENET (User’s Network) is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. ↩

  2. AOL (America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. ↩

  3. Etiquette in technology, colloquially referred to as netiquette, is a term used to refer to the unofficial code of policies that encourage good behavior on the Internet which is used to regulate respect and polite behavior on social media platforms, online chatting sites, web forums, and other online engagement websites. The rules of etiquette that apply when communicating over the Internet are different from these applied when communicating in person or by audio (such as telephone) or video call. It is a social code that is used in all places where one can interact with other human beings via the Internet, including text messaging, email, online games, Internet forums, chat rooms, and many more. Although social etiquette in real life is ingrained into our social life, netiquette is a fairly recent concept. ↩