From: [address withheld] (Dave Mack)
Newsgroups: w.talk
Subject: The w Hierarchy - The True Story
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 1997 13:44:27 -0700
Organization: WebTV Subscriber


This is going to be a very long article. I apologize for that, but I'm a
boring old windbag and I'm not about to change my spots.

Background: companies live or die based on the public's perception of
them and of their products. This is as true of WebTV as of any
other company. While the WebTV display units in retail stores are
supposed to be running castrated software that won't let you send email
or read or post Netnews, some are still running the same client software
everyone else is. Also, WebTV lends units to product reviewers and
journalists for evaluation, and they have access to all of the unit's
capabilities.

The Death of webtv.talk: I'm sure most of you know what webtv.talk was
like near the end. If you don't, visit news:w.katzenjammer. We received
lots of email from users who thought that webtv.talk had become a
cesspool and should be removed. The final straw was not
actually the pornographic "DA BUNNY" pic,
but the fact that a subscriber was demoing her WebTV unit for her
grandchildren and thought that showing them a picture of a sweet little
bunny rabbit would be just perfect. You can imagine the subsequent
email. Perhaps you can also imagine what it would have been like if that
had been a consumer electronics product reviewer's introduction to WebTV
(see Background paragraph.)

Dave's Dilemma: I had to fight like a Spartan to get webtv.talk created
in the first place. Having to nuke it was not a pleasant experience for
me. I knew that the folks who inhabited webtv.talk would be bitter about
losing the group  and, believe it or not, everyone at WebTV actually
wants all of our customers to be happy with our product - even the
vermin (:-) in webtv.talk.

Dave's Other Dilemma: webtv.talk turned out not to be big enough for all
of the webtv.talkers and they started branching out, invading newsgroups
outside of the webtv hierarchy.
newsgroup.name.here was (I think) first. Due to a miscommunication,
someone had it nuked almost immediately while I was out of the office. I
screeched at people about not deleting "real" newsgroups, even though
newsgroup.name.here was an obvious mistake created by some idiot who
didn't bother to fill in "newsgroup.name.here" with the
real.newsgroup.name. alt.weemba was next, and that wasn't too awful
since weemba doesn't spend much time on the net any more and the
newsgroup is basically dead. Then they tried to move into
gnu.emacs.gnews. Bad move. GNEWS is a macro package that runs inside the
emacs text editor, and it still has some fans out there, even though
they don't post to that newsgroup very much. We received email about
"off-topic posting" by our subscribers. Luckily, the invaders gave up on
gnu.emacs.gnews on their own. They took over alt.hahaha, alt.aber and
alt.vvm soon thereafter. To me, this constituted a fairly ugly pattern.
Usenet newsgroups are  generally intended to be used to discuss a
specific topic, not for random chatter by a specific group of people.
The talk hierarchy was created to provide a place for people to hold
miscellaneous discussions and even it is divided up into topic areas. I
felt that it was only a matter of time until our invading hordes
accidentally invaded "Borg space" and drew unwanted attention to WebTV
(see Background paragraph again.)

Solution?: So I went to the powers that be and said, "Look, we have
these problems: people want to post outrageous stuff but we don't want
it to appear that WebTV endorses or condones it; they want to split up
into smaller, more private groups  based on their interests, likes,
dislikes, etc.; but a lot of them want to confine their articles to
ensure that only other WebTV owners see them; and last, I'm afraid that
if they invade any more groups en masse, it's going to start to damage
the company's rep on the Net.
I have what I think is a solution to all of these problems at once:
let's replace webtv.talk with a new newsgroup hierarchy called w that
only exists inside WebTV, but we won't publicize it or deal with it in
any way. We'll create the playing field but deciding how they play on it
will be up to our users. They can post pretty much anything they want to
without us interferring, obvious exceptions being death threats, kiddie
porn, and the like. If we get complaints from users about the behavior
there, we'll deal with it the way we would if we received a complaint
about a posting from one of our users to any other part of Usenet." (If
it's a violation of the Terms of Service, they'll be warned in email. If
the behavior continues, their account can be suspended, either
temporarily or permanently. When I say account, I don't mean a
discardable username. I mean that box goes dead for a few weeks or
months or forever.)

Victory: they bought it. Not without some argument, but they decided to
let me go ahead, probably under the theory of doling out enough rope. So
I created w.talk and announced it in alt.weemba, alt.hahaha, alt.aber
and alt.vvm.
Now there are around 20 w newsgroups, with more requests coming in every
hour.

Who to blame: me. This was my idea and, as far as I know, I'm the only
person working at WebTV who is paying any attention to the goings on in
the w hierarchy. I'm also pretty much the only one who gives a tinker's
damn where you post. I guess at heart I'm a Usenet Purity Police
wannabee. I was around when AOL unleashed its users on Usenet and it
wasn't pretty. I don't want a repeat with WebTV in the starring role.
I'm not asking anyone not to post to Usenet groups on the outside. I'm
asking that you post in a way that won't piss off the rest of Usenet -
we have big pipes but 40 million annoyed people sending email would be
difficult to handle. If you post to a newsgroup, please make sure that
your article is appropriate for the intended topic of the group (if you
can figure out what the topic is - alt.aber? alt.hahaha? Yeesh. )  I
don't expect anyone to stop posting to alt.weemba, alt.hahaha or
alt.aber. alt.vvm may be a different story, but nothing will happen to
that unless we receive complaints from VVM, Inc. about it.

I'm sure none of this will sway the conspiracy theorists, but, hey,
that's life.

David Wallace Mack 
Systems Admin, WebTV Networks, Inc. 
Hey, I work for 'em,  I don't speak for 'em.