the tail of this thread, which is the only one shareable, is here: https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/6601370-it-s-a-solvable-prob
An Eternal September is an event where an incoming, younger 'micro-generation' (my term. 'cohort' is probably more accurate, but it's not as much of a self-describing term) outstrips the pre-established [culture, norms, traditions, knowledge] of an online community, and then pass that on to those who come after. It was originally about first-year university students, who got their first access to the internet at the start of the term, in September, making usenet unreadable with posts that didn't know those norms, and often repeated the same patterns as before. I use it mostly neutrally.
It's usually used as a pejorative, a lament, but I think that's defeatist.
An Eternal September is a sign of your community, organization, social media site, etc succeeding and growing at a speed beyond what those building and participating in it could have imagined. Beyond what they could have planned for. Beyond what they have the onboarding capacity for.
My hunch is you solve it by actually writing things down. I know I'm bad at this, I do some of it but they're all still in private notes and I need to heavily work on that. But you solve this, this phenomenon that keeps happening in every community, by writing stuff down. We were given the gift of writing, of reading, of being able to stand on the previous work of others instead of having to constantly re-explain everything every generation. And seem to have forgotten about it.
You gotta do the other part of it too. You gotta eat your vegetables. It sucks, it's time that could go to other things. But it's how you fix the things that constantly get complained about, and, in a very real sense, it's how we get forward progress that isn't 60% rehashing the same things as the last cycle.
So much time is spent complaining about the teens, so many words written. You gotta eat your vegetables.