AHC: Avoid or end Eternal September

In the old USENET days, every September a new group of college students would get access to the web for the first time and flood the USENET boards with questions and other newbie behaviors until they could learn the basics and the customs and settle in. However, in 1993, a variety of factors, including that AOL allowed all its clients access to USENET, meant that the September rush was far larger than USENET's ability to assimilate them, and that stream kind of hasn't let up. As Dave Fischer put it in January, 1994: "It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended." So, your challenge is simple: avoid or end Eternal September. I'm not going to be more specific than that because I'd like to see what variety of approaches people can come up with, but here's some basic thoughts in my mind:

  • Web access doen't grow fast enough to leave its roots behind. May be a smaller interet than today, with less popular acceptance.
  • Cultural shifts in the internet bring back something approaching old internet culture, with the new arger internet population being able to assimilate the faster growth of the modern Web.
  • Post-apocalypse in 2012 (turn out the Mayans were right), only the uber-geeks still keep any semblance of a worldwide internet limping along, and they are the only ones who still use it for discussions and the like.
 
Sorry, the most I can see happening is delaying it by a few years. By 1993, the internet was inevitably going to go mainstream, it was just a matter of when some large corporate entity would realize what kind of money they could make with it. And, once mainstream, there's no way to have a single internet culture anymore, there are too many people on it.
 
Sooner or later a mass influx would have come. All you can do is arrange for the existing community to be as large as possible, and spread apart the factors that led to it where possible.

We could have a noticeably different US-descended English-speaking internet culture. We probably couldn't change the fact that in 2010 the old order looks back to one specific date where it all went to frell.
 
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