Stacy Horn: From the Start, I Made an Effort to Get Women Online

▮ The Nexus: Before founding Echo, which online communities were you involved in? How did those experiences influence your decision to create Echo? 

Stacy Horn: My earliest introduction to online community was in 1982. I was working in telecommunications and a co-worker grabbed me and said, “You have to see this.” It was a BBS filled with teenage boys who were endearing in a “Big Bang Theory” way. I was transfixed by what I was seeing. I started interacting with them and quickly realized, they think I’m a guy! They didn’t believe I was female, but once I convinced them, they were like a pack of excited puppies.

But in the 1980s, few people were online to begin with, and like that BBS I mentioned, it was mostly guys having mostly technical discussions. On The WELL there were all these smart, funny people, talking about a wide variety of subjects and ideas - there was just nothing like it.

It saddens me to think how the larger social networks today cannot touch places like The WELL for intelligent conversation, humor, and warmth (and Echo!). It’s not that the people in these other networks are not capable of what I’m talking about; they are not congregating in places that inspire and encourage it.

On a side note, thank you Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the bulletin board system that inspired me and many others. He just died and I feel terrible that I never thanked him or his co-inventor, Randy Suess.

To get around this, I called everyone who tried Echo and asked them how it was going and offered to help. I held classes in my West Village apartment called “Echo School.” And very early on I started holding face to face gatherings. The original reason for this was based on my experience on The WELL. One frustrating thing for me was I couldn’t meet the people I was getting to know in-person. Not easily, anyway. Most of them were in California and elsewhere. This led me to position Echo as a mostly local service, so people could meet in person if they chose. People outside New York City were welcomed and wanted, but I didn’t do much outreach outside New York.  

Fueling this decision was the fact that one of the many things I loved about The WELL was the West Coast flavor. What fun is it to go some place if it feels exactly like the place you just left? I wanted Echo to have an East Coast feel. I wanted people to feel like they were visiting or hanging out in New York City.

The face to face gatherings turned out to help Echo in a number of ways. It contributed to people feeling more bonded to Echo and that gave them the patience to hang in there and get past the various technical difficulties.

And the technical obstacles were enormous. I couldn’t find investors at the time and had to do a lot myself. I had to learn Unix, etc. Thank god for the people who came along to try Echo and ended up helping me and helping Echo survive and grow. The only skill I had was a background in telecommunications and my experience battling phone companies. In the early days, online communities were accessed by phone lines, and I knew how to get the phone companies to provide quality lines.

I also discovered that it was one of the most effective tools I had to manage conflict. One of the very first lessons I learned on Echo - though this is going to sound quaint now - is that people are pretty much the same online as they are in person. It’s one thing to act a certain way for a while, but for most people it’s hard to keep that up over time. Eventually people get to know who you really are.

So you put a group of people together, and in addition to all the great things that happen between people, bad things happen as well. People fight; people say ugly things. When conflicts flared, I was expected to do something about it. This was not fun. I didn’t feel up to it. I didn’t have any particular skills or talent for it, and I had no experience. I agonized over every decision, trying to do the right thing. 

But I did discover that it was easier to settle a dispute in person than it was online, so I would try to get everyone involved in whatever conflict I was trying to settle to go to the next face to face event planned. This didn’t always work, but it did most of the time.

I also made sure that half the hosts were women. Hosts set the tone and half the hosts on Echo were women. When women got online, they saw women in charge everywhere. Women had a voice on Echo.

Finally, we created a number of private conferences to give different groups safe spaces to talk, and one of them was a conference for women only. 

Here is how it is worded:

Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated. Concerning email and YO’s specifically [YOs are real-time messages that you can send to someone and they pop up on their screen when they are logged into Echo]:  “While abuse, harassment, and even bigotry are hard to define, there’s one good rule of thumb:  if a message recipient complains, stop.”  (From The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog.)

The way it works is, if someone is bothering, you ask them to stop. If they don’t, tell the host. If it continues, tell me.  

Echo was always a smaller community and now even smaller, so I don’t have direct experience managing a community as large as places like Twitter (can’t call it X) or Facebook. Twitter made a good start when they made a good faith effort to curb misinformation for instance, but the current owner, unfortunately, is one of those people I just mentioned who amplifies the worst of humanity.  Facebook used to post warnings about posts that may contain misinformation, but I haven’t seen that in a long time.

The example I gave, misinformation, is just half of the problem. The first half is the fact that it spreads far and wide quickly. We can do something about that. The second half is the number of people who embrace it without questioning or researching the facts. I don’t know what to do about that.

So I would also add getting people together in person. This was easy for me, dealing with a relatively small number of people who mostly lived within a few miles of each other. But it’s not impossible to manage large groups. It would take more work and more money, but it is absolutely possible.

We also need many more people moderating discussions.

At a certain point, I started writing more, and promoting Echo less. It was something I’d wanted to do since I was nine-years old: write books. Eventually I wasn’t trying to grow Echo at all, and at that point I started letting the walls down. Now I feel like any other user, which perhaps made managing that recent conflict so hard for me.

Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town

So when I was asked to write a book about “cyberspace”, I thought it would be more interesting to write about the reality of it, that it was not the utopia many people thought it would be. I used real examples although I did not use real names, except in one case where I thought the person would want me to, and he later verified that he was glad I used his name. I thought it was important to show that people not only behaved just as badly online as they would anywhere else, but that some people behaved even worse, and it was something that needed to be addressed and discussed.

Looking back, I wish I had rung that bell even louder.

AI might help moderate bad behavior, but here’s the problem I see with that. There are some who seem to view those who disagree with them, especially when it comes to politics, as being somehow less than human, and undeserving of common decency. They are incapable or unwilling to consider the feelings of people who are different. Introducing an element that actually isn’t human might add a layer of unreality that would only exacerbate the problem. However, it might be useful as a tool used to search out and find bad behavior and misinformation that an actual person may respond to.