No more Jill Jail...I guess I'll have to call it MM's Jail...ROLLINGQUICKERTHANTHEDISCOVERYONTAKEOFF.
Subject 23479
A place to say your farewell's to our favorite Webmistress.
Friday, October 30, 1998
Exclusive: Silicon Investor's Sheriff Lady departs
Jill McKinney, all-powerful Webmistress of Silicon
Investor's raucous bulletin boards, tells Money.com
why she is hanging up her holster
By Borzou Daragahi
moneydaily.com (Jill's picture!)
For the last two years, Jill McKinney has been a
solitary soldier in the army of good taste and
Internet decorum, standing guard in a watchtower over
the millions of messages posted to the mammoth Silicon
Investor stock-discussion Web site
(http://www.techstocks.com) and booting out folks who
broke the rules.
The legendary Webmistress of the 100,000-member SI,
she has broken up ferocious online fights, ejected
shameless pitchmen, and stepped in to warn countless
users about cussing, vulgarity and ad hominem attacks.
For her efforts, she has received death threats,
marriage proposals, a dozen roses, and even
accusations of impersonating a woman. "She's a babe,"
says Chester Lee, a San Francisco chemist who met
McKinney at a party (everyone knew who Jill was) and
has since become a pal.
As Money.com caught up with the number three player at
SI, the first employee hired by co-founders Brad
and Jeff Dryer, the 27-year-old Birmingham, Ala.
native was thinking about marriage and what to do with
her cut of the $35 million in stock Seattle-based Go2Net (Nasdaq: GNET) paid in June to buy the booming financial discussion board.
McKinney's packing her bags. Gone are the days when she sat home listening to Rush and Elton John in her pajamas while answering floods of user Email and patiently waiting for the Dryer brothers to cut her paycheck. "It's not because they didn't have the money," she recalls. "It's because they forgot."
McKinney will soon hand over her linguistic enforcer badge to her assistant, Bob Zunbrunnen, whom she recruited as a poster on her boards. And yes, fans, in December she's going to marry that boy, Go2Net ad salesman Nate "Lou" Munden, then move to New York City to do public relations work for the company.
Alas, McKinney is growing up. Six years after dropping out of South Alabama University, she's a player at a company with a $111.6 million market capitalization that actually is big enough to worry about things like public relations and lawsuits. "We've gone from three people who didn't think we were going to be around in 3 to 6 months to a corporate environment," McKinney says.
"When we were independent, we would just laugh at lawsuit threats! We didn't have any money! Brad and Jeff were sleeping on the floor. I was living in this awful basement studio apartment and we are all wearing the same T-shirts everyday!"
McKinney's role as moderator and conflict-resolution specialist on the frontiers of new media has no offline parallel, save playground monitor - in a schoolyard where all of the kids are big and vociferous. Even SI's policing of its threads is an exception to the general unruliness of Internet stock discussion boards.
SI doesn't really care what you say about a given company, so long as you don't cuss, use vulgar terms, spam the boards or personally harass other posters. If you do, you may find yourself serving a two to three-day suspension, what members jokingly call "Jill Jail" or "Fort Bob." Do it again, and you may be exiled permanently.
McKinney's rules allow posters to poke fun at her (or at Bob) without fear of reprisals. "Let's all light some incense and pray to Jill McKinney, the Goddess of good manners on SI," one wiseguy wrote. "I find it amusing that I have this supposed authority over all these people," says Sheriff Jill. "They actually threaten one another with turning each other in to me."
While anyone can read the boards, members must pay a $200 lifetime subscription fee if they want to speak up. Though that requirement has kept some of the rabble off the boards, the attacks can still get downright personal. And if you're booted out, don't expect a refund.
During a recent discussion about Franklin Telecommunications (OTC: FTEL), one member who was bullish on the stock started a brouhaha after he likened a short-seller to Hitler. Pretty soon, a third guy was inviting the accuser to visit the Holocaust Memorial so he could understand how Hitler's victims felt, thus drawing a body block himself ("It baffles me how someone from my heritage could lower themselves this far") even as the accused was doing the Rodney King, appealing for peace: "It is my hope that we can cover over what we see as the shortcomings of each other and live in harmony".
McKinney's real accomplishment may be that she managed to keep a wary eye on 15,000 new board messages per day, while fielding hundreds of Emails reporting infractions, outrages and hurt feelings. In a series of Email and telephone interviews with Money.com, she described SI's early days and her endless battles to enforce the bulletin board's "Terms of Use
Mr M. |
