Hi Steve,
I just had a person inform me about the end of EP and the beginning of SW. Their take on it (and I asked for some substantial knowledge of why they believed what they told me ) was that EP fell into the hands of some incompetent owners and that it was finally shut down by the police. I can't buy that idea at all.
I wrote back to the person and offered my recollections about what I felt I was joining on to when I did subscribe to EP and I'm going to put that response out here for everyone to see. I don't know if it's correct, but it was strong in my mind the whole time I was on EP. I HOPE OTHERS MIGHT JOIN IN ON THIS AND EITHER SUPPORT MY MEMORIES OR CORRECT THEM???
Here's the response I gave
Hmmm... you have more information than I have on that. Did/do you know these people or did someone tell you that?
When I joined EP (I've forgotten when) - it was a good 4 years before it closed, it was mentioned that EP had a definite life-span i.e., it was a social experiment being run by an institution whose people were drawing inferences from the exchanges we (the subscribers) were submitting. My take on that was that they were sort of doing a 'Big Brother' project (spying but letting us know they were spying) so they could get a 'temperature' of what people in society think about and talk about when they are expressing their opinions, needs and wants anonymously. I understood there were 5 people at the lead and the purpose of the moderators (like EP Allie) was to keep it from becoming a 'smut' site (only) - therefore the moderators would cut into those conversations (solicitations, perv stuff that was illegal, selling dope/sex online, etc.) so the rest of us would want to stick around and keep giving them social insights (for whatever reason).
Now on the premise that the same people set up SW - I can't buy that, otherwise they would have used the very successful programming that EP offered. I think the closure of EP was just the end of an experiment- probably having been sponsored by a university social science department. And that would explain why it ended.
Don't forget too that there was a period of time when EP was closing down that we were all saying goodbye to each other and hoping that some other site would appear to replace it. Plus: The very fact that we can (still) get some of our conversations downloaded from the EP site would indicate that it wasn't closed by the police.
