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But, of course, as a social media platform grows, those filters change or fall away.

Facebook expanded enrollment to high school students, then dropped the requirement of an educational affiliation all together.

AOL, which at the time was mailing physical install media to every mailing address in the United States, unsolicited, repeatedly, plugged itself into USENET and opened the floodgates in an event that is referred to as the September That Never Ended.

(For those of you who don't know, that term refers to the fact that previously, large numbers of clueless users who didn't know how to operate USENET only showed up at the beginning of the American academic year. AOL not being tied to the academic calendar and having large numbers of new users every day, effectively swamped the capacity of USENET culture to assimilate new members by sending a September's worth of cluelessness every month forever thereafter.)

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