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.
When people are learning things, they talk about it, they share it, etc. Newcomer spaces form in an attempt to onboard them and because of that, newcomers see the trailing edge of the micro-generation ahead of them, the people who have learned some, but not much. Because others with more experience don't have the time for it -- it's not Their New Project With So Much To Learn -- the people who are experienced and sticking around to mentor aren't the ones informing people most of the time, it's that trailing edge. They're well meaning, but, well.
People in general learn easiest from people just a few steps ahead of them (Ask me about the "1950s maoists basically created a kind of twitter" tangent). The ideal form of this is a tree -- the newer people are learning from those slightly newer than them, who are learning from the people who've done a little more than them, etc.
Instead, the state of self-publishing means that the motivated newcomers are more able to have high production value, in video, blogs, whatever. Because they're motivated, but you'd be doing it out of your sense of duty, etc. So it gets pushed back. It's talked about among others you know, deep in the jargon and the breadth of knowledge you've accumulated with time. Voice chats, discords, twitter, tumblr, even cohost. But never anywhere durable, anywhere that hits above on search results or social media, other than by accident.
You gotta write things down if you want it fixed.
It's a solvable problem. But it's hard. The squeeze is hitting everyone and there just isn't the free time. The hustle, the gigs, the way we're kept from doing anything that takes more than a few days. But the way to fix things is to write it down.
Every community has a lot of skills distributed across it just because of human nature, and so many of those are barely used. So many words are spilled on how much the teens/people newer to your community are causing problems, when instead the effort could go to writing down thoughts and experiences and goals and futures.
I'm tired rehasing the same thing every three to five years. I don't know what it will look like. I don't know how long it'll take. But this is unsustainable at this rate. We have to figure out how to keep up with success of our communities sustainably without burning everyone out. Have community knowledge be durable instead of tacit, a thing that can be built on. There've been so many projects that tried. People build new ones instead. They might not even have known the others existed, because they weren't able to stay talked about, be shared, stay in the meta, so to speak.
Open source may be worth looking at -- there's a collaboration there that community knowledge needs to follow. It still has it's faults, open source constantly has people reinventing things and things being undiscoverable. Something between a wiki and github, in my eyes, maybe.
I don't have answers. These are notes I'm pasting from my notebook with a little editorializing. But I've been thinking about this since whenever I first posted on the endless/eternal september tags (they aren't separate things, I just keep forgetting the word).
Only thing I do know is that being annoyed at the teens won't help. I've seen that particular cycle at least five times now. A few of you, I've seen on both sides of the arc, with your younger role espousing the reversed position.