Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Mon, 6 May 1991 06:16:01 GMT From: Jim Budler Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: GEnie Management Acting a la Prodigy Management? Message-ID: Organization: Silvar-Lisco Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 338, Message 2 of 9 Lines: 74 In article amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker) writes: > Sigh. From what I understand, this is one of the more annoying recent > developments on the timesharing service front. Here are the facts as > I understand them: > From her messages on GEnie, Linda Kaplan presents herself a quite > annoying person with no sense of humor and precious little sense of > how courtesy applies to public communication. A "sysop" of one GEnie > round table (who is responisble for being a pseudo-moderator, keeping > discussions on track, putting out flamewars, etc.) got sufficiently > irritated with her behavior on his round table that he locked her out > of it for a while. Linda Kaplan has been around on Compuserve and GEnie for a long time. Long enough that she was given a free account on GEnie. I don't think you can say she doesn't understand "how courtesy applies to public communication". The sysop got her free account pulled. > Linda subsequently started complaining, and roudned up support from a > large group of ex-Prodigy people (who are, after all, quite reasonably > sensitive to electronic censorship). Unfortunately, these people then > assumed that GEnie management was just like Prodigy management, and > started jumping to conclusions and making "pre-emptive" accusations to > GEnie and GE management. This, needless to say, did not do much to GEnie management said "shut up or we'll pull your account, too", undoubtedly to make the ex-Prodigy folk feel at home. > I do not know if it has been resolved, but I will be quite annoyed if > a bunch of disgruntled ex-Prodigy users end up instigating a self- > fulfilling prophecy, and turning the best public timesharing service I > have used into a hostile environment, or shut it down completely > (which GEIS might well do if GEnie ends up being too much trouble). I don't know if has been resolved either, but from the April 23 issue of {MacWeek}: "GEnie replaces general manager involved in on-line controversy". GEnie denies it is due to the controversy, of course. Although I doubt that Linda will get her free account back, the removal of the man who made the "shut up or be kicked out" statement will perhaps make people feel that GEnie is at least trying to understand that people expect freedom of speech in their network services. > I have quite a number of people of friends who depend on GEnie (one of > whom is hearing impaired and uses email as her lifeline to the outside > world), and I resent people screwing things up for everyone else > because one person cried wolf. I like GEnie, but also don't think she cried wolf. I think she had a dispute with a sysop, and neither person involved knew how to take it off-line and resolve it properly. The boss got dragged in, and then he didn't know how to handle it properly, either. This is really a case of interperson dispute. The fact that one person was a person of authority, and his boss backed him, made it a national issue. At this point GEnie's "boss" GE Information Services has stepped in and replaced Bill Louden as General Manager, while denying it is due to this. I take this to indicate that GIS (GEIS?) doesn't like censorship and am happy. Jim Budler jimb@silvlis.com | Proud Silvar-Lisco +1.408.991.6115 | MacIIsi 703 E. Evelyn Ave. Sunnyvale, Ca. 94086 | owner