Rumor Monger (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Rumor Monger (2005)

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34 pointsBIackSwan3 comments

Rumor Monger was pretty awesome. My memory is that it took only a few weeks for management to clamp down.

First message, "Look people, HR is really unhappy with this. Be responsible."

Whereupon, many people who didn't even know about RM went off and installed it, with predictable results.

Second message, "If you're running Rumor Monger, we want you to turn it off." Apparently this message varied by group; I had no idea that RM hadn't been simply banned company-wide.

[Arthur C Clarke wrote an RM-like system into his book _The Songs of Distant Earth_; it allowed ship-wide anonymous communication, and somehow it didn't go off-the-rails nasty.]

A similar thing happened to JWZ when he worked at Netscape; he started a private, off site mailing list where employees would say whatever they wanted. The company found out about it and shut it down (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html)

We had that in the Apple Newton group, three times.

Do groups outside the US / Silly Valley engineering culture have these?

First, a "slackers" Majordomo list (hosted on company hardware) that anyone could add themselves to. Plenty of relatively harmless snark and stuff about how the Death March was going. Problem: Too many managers added themselves to the list. I'm okay with managers as people on a list like slackers, but not as managers in their official capacity. It's possible that HR was involved in some of the traffic; time to go . . .

Second, a hidden, invite-only list ("slackers2"). Lots more traffic, more venting, generally a place where you could let your hair down, relax, and fire off a "this totally pissed me off today" rant. Problem: Managers started to find out about it and ask too many questions.

Third, an off-site invite-only list ("fyyff", ahem, you figure it out...) that was much more private, and survived most of the people leaving Newton.

I'm convinced that this kind of list serves a useful purpose. It may also be necessary that it both (a) exists, and (b) be officially frowned upon. I don't think that an official venting forum (Management: "Hey, you can let off steam in this list over here and we totally won't care, honest") will work.

[I still have the fyyff.com domain, though it's not doing much today because it was a bad spam and joe-job magnet]

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