When an Online Community Pro Retires

[00:00:04] Announcer: You’re listening to Community Signal, the podcast for online community professionals. Here’s your host, Patrick O’Keefe.

[music]

[00:00:18] Patrick O’Keefe: Hello and thank you for listening to Community Signal. Almost eight years ago, on the third episode of our show, we were joined by Rebecca Newton, who was more than 20 years deep in community work, with a focus on creating safe spaces for kids online. Now, after 30 years in the commercial internet industry, Rebecca is retiring, and I thought that would be a great opportunity for us to talk about what it means to retire from this line of work.

Before we jump in, I want to touch on what is happening in Israel and Palestine, especially for those of us who do the work of online community moderation, trust, safety, and policy. This is a more than usual challenging stressful, and at times, it will feel like you can do no right. Knowing the work is knowing that we will make mistakes, but also that we must adjust. I encourage everyone to find the nuance, to ensure that you are allowing for activism, but not bigotry.

That can be a hard line to find because you will anger people. They will call you names. We must try to recognize the lines between activism and antisemitism, or Islamophobia. Bigots are cleverly using this moment to inject their bigotry into various movements. This has always been the case, but it’s only growing more pronounced. Failing to reject that bigotry taints activism with hatred, and we must be vigilant. The catchphrase you were shouting might have a different meaning than you think.

Words have meaning, and we should choose them carefully. Cynically, I know that there are folks that some online platforms who are seeing engagement numbers go up, way up. I’m thinking, “That’s great. Let everyone have at it, and tear each other apart, who can tell what’s true or not. Why does it matter? That’s not our responsibility,” but that isn’t what we do. I know some disagree with this philosophy, but for smaller platforms’ online communities, I’m a big proponent of the idea that if you don’t think you can host a conversation responsibly, you don’t need to host that conversation.

If you’re a small online community for joggers, or some other random topic, and you have three volunteer moderators, you don’t suddenly need to devote all of that moderation time to tragic world events. There are plenty of spaces to have those conversations online, and the world needs well and moderated spaces. The world needs spaces where we can come together, and get to know each other, and other facets of one another. Thank you for doing the work. With that, let’s introduce our guest.

Rebecca Newton has spent 30 years in the commercial internet industry. As head of Digital Trust & Community, Rebecca led online community, online safety, moderation, engagement in customer service efforts at SuperAwesome of Epic Games, from 2015 to 2023. Prior to joining SuperAwesome, Rebecca worked at Mind Candy as the chief community and safety officer, serving over 140 million registered young users.

From 2001 to 2007, she worked at Sulake, the company behind Habbo Hotels as the global director of community for the world’s largest teen virtual world site, spanning 24 countries. She began her online community career with America Online in 1994, where she wore many hats, and finally landed as the program manager for AOL’s Community Leader Program. Among her contributions to the discipline of online community, Rebecca co-founded VirComm, the London-based annual conference for online community professionals in 2011, and the e-mint community management listserv.

She serves on boards and committees for numerous organizations including AgeCheq, The Archewell Foundation, and DitchTheLabel.org. Rebecca, welcome to the show.

[00:03:35] Rebecca Newton: Thank you, Patrick.

[00:03:37] Patrick O’Keefe: Before we start a conversation, I wanted to take a moment, and just give you your flowers. This is my 25th year on online community, moderation, trust, and safety, and I’ve met a lot of people. I’ve met a lot of people who created things that they said were for the benefit of those who do this work, like online resources, and books, and courses, conferences, and meetups. A lot of them were and are great people, I know some of them aren’t, and some disappointed me over time, but you were one person who has never let me down.

[00:04:08] Rebecca Newton: Oh.

[00:04:09] Patrick O’Keefe: Over the last 10-plus years, I’ve been asked many times who my favorite community professionals are, and who I held in high regard? There had been some changes to that list over the years, but your name has always been there. It’s one name that has never changed.

[00:04:22] Rebecca Newton: Thank you.

[00:04:23] Patrick O’Keefe: When I think about you, I think about someone who is credible, I think about someone who did the work, who paid your dues, you were taking on senior roles, and pushing us higher as a profession in corporate environments, in some cases, 10-plus years before I’ve heard others say they created those kinds of role.

[00:04:44] Rebecca Newton: Oh, yes. That’s all right.

[00:04:45] Patrick O’Keefe: I feel comfortable saying that you’ve influenced a generation of online community builders, while at the same time, from personal experience, always being approachable, and welcoming to new folks. I know that I felt that when we met years ago. and when I wrote a book, and you couldn’t have been more supportive as I’ve tried to create things for this space with the goal of being helpful and finding my own confidence and finding my own voice, and I’ve always been grateful for your encouragement.

In your caretaking of e-mint, which I see as one of the most important online community resources for people who do this work, you have facilitated a place that has helped a lot of people, a place for a growing, at the time that it was early and misunderstood discipline that paved the way for this profession that we know today, and e-mint was there at crucial juncture, and it touched a lot of people. First of all, with all of that thrown at you, thank you, Rebecca, for all of your contributions to the profession, and congratulations on the incredible career you’ve had so far.

[00:05:41] Rebecca Newton: Well, thank you. Thank you. It’s been a long journey, and an interesting one. It’s funny when you said that about people who claim to have been the first to do this and that. It reminded me of when Facebook came along, and people considered it like the Friendster, and Facebook and MySpace, the first social networks. I was like, “Oh, no, no, no. These things have been around a long time.” It’s kind of the same thing, especially being in this so long. I guess decade after decade, I keep seeing the same patterns. That’s been fascinating to me. I’m sure you’ve seen this too where, oh, we’d had this same conversation in the ’90s, and people thought it was new then, and it was kind of new then.

[00:06:27] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. It was more new. [chuckles]

[00:06:29] Rebecca Newton: Yes. Now you see the same wheels being reinvented and the generations that are coming after us, and that’s just a fact. This is not me making any disparaging comments at all about people’s ages or whatever. The generations that are following us, those who have come after us, are trying to fix some of the same problems that we had, that maybe they were packaged a little differently.

[00:06:55] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. Like you said, it’s not disparaging. It’s a great, beautiful thing, this discovery. I think the tough thing is when it’s like the claim. The land claim of like, “Oh, we discovered this.” That’s the line there. Because it’s so natural and it’s wonderful people to discover it, and then sometimes go back and see like, “Oh, there was this thing. There was that thing. There were so many things.”

[00:07:14] Rebecca Newton: Yes, and there’s nothing new under the sun.

[00:07:16] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:07:17] Rebecca Newton: Even the online world in the ’80s and the ’90s started, I guess, officially in 1980, but really more officially in ’83, the Department of Defense. Even then, there was networks, we’d call them social now, and some of the same things that we are seeing even today. Everything, it’s all evolution. I guess, we could go back a couple thousand years.

[00:07:43] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes. You could really dig deep if you want.

[00:07:46] Rebecca Newton: Yes, I was beating these two rocks together trying to make fire.

[laughter]

[00:07:50] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes, we wrote a note in the sand, and another person walked by. As we’ve discussed, I wanted to focus this episode on retirement because I think it’s something that we don’t talk about, but it is something that also, I think, is important to recognize, that we have a lot of people who– I want to put this in the most respectful way. There are folks older than you.

[00:08:07] Rebecca Newton: Yes.

[00:08:07] Patrick O’Keefe: You’re retiring at a time where you’re just looking to do other things. There are people who are working on similar projects before you even, and long before, and before me. We say 25, 30 years, but there are other folks. I want to focus on you a little bit. After 30 years, when did you come to this decision? When did you realize that you were ready to retire?

[00:08:29] Rebecca Newton: There’s a caveat, I’m always going to be willing to talk to people about this industry.

[00:08:35] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:08:36] Rebecca Newton: I just want put that out there.

[00:08:37] Patrick O’Keefe: Door’s not slammed shut.

[00:08:39] Rebecca Newton: Yes. I love talking to people about this industry. I’d say about a year ago. I thought about it even before then, but couldn’t really afford it. Then about a year ago, I just sat down and I wasn’t very happy with where I was. My day-to-day work. It wasn’t anybody’s– Nobody was being mean. Nobody was being this or that. I just wasn’t very happy. I didn’t feel very creative in my work, and that’s really important to me.

I thought, “Well, maybe I just need to move on.” That was about a year ago. I did the math and thought, “Oh, I can actually do this. [chuckles] It just never occurred to me.” I started preparing for it about a year ago. Best way to answer that. I can talk about that for an hour. Here I am, two weeks away, like two weeks away.

[00:09:30] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes, when this show comes out. I’m not sure when we’ll get it out with the holidays, but it’ll be right around the time probably. Yes. I want to talk about that and prep a little bit, because online community work is many things, and among them, it is a role where we care for others. It’s an emotionally-taxing role, and you’ve been doing it for kids, a particularly sensitive and vulnerable group. You get used to that, certainly, after doing it for so long, and you get used to the stress that’s associated with it. It’s just a part of your day-to-day, it’s a part of your life. At this point, it’s simply routine, I assume, but I feel like when we walk away from a project or from a career like that or from whatever, a community, there is this gap that we’ll create. Talk about that a little bit. What do you think it’ll be like when you step away from day-to-day ownership of that care?

[00:10:18] Rebecca Newton: The care of a team. A lot of people might not know this, but I’ve been in a team with some of the same people for 20-plus years and many of them for 12 or more years. I was thinking the other day– I get a little melancholy, honestly, thinking about this because for 30 years, my life has been pinging people back and forth through– It started out with the buddy list. I was at AOL when we created after the buddy list, AOL Messenger.

[00:10:47] Patrick O’Keefe: AIM?

[00:10:48] Rebecca Newton: Yes, AIM. Right. I’ve been doing that every day for 30 years to the people I work with or colleagues. Every day for 30 years. My team, they’re not my team anymore, but the team that I’ve been part of for so long, it’s like growing up with a family. We have a whole way. The same with working with kids every day, I’ve really missed that. It’s been eight months or so since we closed down PopJam, and I’m not around kids at all online. I have grandchildren and–

[00:11:23] Patrick O’Keefe: Rebecca will never speak to a child again after this.

[00:11:25] Rebecca Newton: I know.

[laughter]

[00:11:27] Patrick O’Keefe: “Grandkids,” it’s like, “don’t bother me anymore.”

[00:11:29] Rebecca Newton: [chuckles] My youngest one’s eight, so he’s not as interested in hanging out with grammy, although he was pretty excited about me working for the company that created Fortnite. I get melancholy about missing all of that. I’ve had eight months to get over missing kids every day because they’re so fresh and they’re so funny and they’re also fun. Especially before 11 or 12, they’re not as tainted as adults, and so they’re open to everything. They want to try everything. They’re discovering everything. They’re still silly. There’s all these things about them that I have missed for the last eight months over at Epic because we don’t do a kid’s thing and we don’t interact with them at all.

Of course, there are some kids in the Epic products, but we don’t ever interact with them. We were interacting with them every single day, and I’ve been doing that since ’94. It’s been very melancholy, and I hope to find some way to tap into continuing doing that on some level, volunteer, or I don’t even know, somehow, because it’s food for my soul. It is, so it’s hard.

Today’s been especially tough. I’m not sure why, but I wrote a couple of friends of mine and texted them today who I’ve been working with for a long time and said, “I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m feeling really weird, and it’s really coming down to the wire.” It’s like I’m leaving in two weeks and I’m moving and all these things are happening at one time and you don’t want to be forgotten or something. I don’t know. I’m in show business a little bit, but it’s probably why people want to be famous writers or famous, right?

[00:13:16] Patrick O’Keefe: Yep.

[00:13:16] Rebecca Newton: It’s to have the living on things. Now, I don’t think I feel like that like, “Oh, I need a big statue that says Rebecca Newton,” but I like the idea of people knowing that I was part of something that has really changed over the last 30 years, really come into its own, and I like to know that.

This is like the Mutual Admiration Society, but you’ve been so supportive about that and giving credit where credit is due, which is something that’s very important to me and always has been in any industry that I’ve worked in, but I think that’s so important and recognizing that there are people now coming along who are really doing great things, but we and I mean many of us, including you, paved the way. Maybe paved is too strong, but at least we had a nice dirt path.

[laughter]

[00:14:11] Patrick O’Keefe: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I live on the Walk of Fame here in Hollywood, and there’s no equivalent, necessarily, for those of us who do this work. Maybe we appear in a few literary citations if you search Google Scholar, and we pop up a few times. I do think there’s a way that we leave a legacy, and I want to get to that a little bit later, but I did want to talk a little bit, too, about is there anything else coming up in that prep? To give you an open question. As you prepare, is there anything else that’s come up beyond that idea of leaving in this care role?

[00:14:41] Rebecca Newton: I’ve thought about writing about my history or the history from my perspectives, like a memoir of the online industry because it’s not just safety, right?

[00:14:53] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:14:54] Rebecca Newton: It’s everything.

[00:14:55] Patrick O’Keefe: I’ve wrote out this list of everything people call adjacent disciplines, and I’m just going to post it on LinkedIn one day. There’s so many different things. If you think about it, there’s people who have a role that says fan engagement. There’s people who have a role that is trust or safety. There’s people who have a role that’s audience engagement or association management. There’s like 50 different terms as I thought about it, I came up with like, you know what? There are differences. Because some people will just get very specific about like there’s a difference, and there is, but we have more in common than we do dissimilar.

[00:15:24] Rebecca Newton: Oh, yes. That’s right. I’ve been thinking about doing a podcast and I don’t mean every week for the rest of my life, but just doing some.

[00:15:33] Patrick O’Keefe: Not like my death sentence. No, I’m not doing every week.

[00:15:37] Rebecca Newton: Then I’ve thought about writing about it, but I like discussing it. I don’t have the patience to write, even though I’m writing a novel, it’s been seven years. That tells you something right there, but I feel like I have some wisdom to share and I can now say that I’m going to be 68 in a few months, and I remember coming into AOL and I was in the 30-something room, then when I turned 40, I was like, “Ooh, 40.” Over 40-room. I was like, “Over 40.” Now, I’m in the almost 70-room or whatever it’s called out there in the world.

I feel like I can say that I have seen some stuff, I understand some stuff and I have some wisdom, and like I said earlier, the patterns, especially working for companies, startups that got big, and that’s been my trajectory for a long time. I had a good nose for what was going to work. I knew AOL was going to do well. I knew Habbo was going to be big. I knew Mind Candy was going to be big. I knew that SuperAwesome was going to come into their own. Now, they weren’t big like Mind Candy, AOL, et cetera, but they got bought by Epic and that’s pretty epic.

I’ve always had a nose for that and I’ve worked for several tech companies as a consultant and stuff that ended up being pretty big. I’ve seen that pattern in business over and over, and that’s just from being on the planet a really long time and being in the industry a really long time. I feel like I have something to share about that to save people a lot of time, trouble and money when they want to build a widget, a project, a product, whatever.

[00:17:19] Patrick O’Keefe: I agree. I think that you should write or podcast or whatever you find that allows you to communicate and I’ll be happy to support it.

[00:17:25] Rebecca Newton: Yes, awesome.

[00:17:26] Patrick O’Keefe: You may have answered this, maybe it is interacting with kids, but I’m going to ask it anyway. What do you think you’ll miss the most?

[00:17:32] Rebecca Newton: I’m going to miss working with people online the most. It’s a different animal than working with people offline and I did plenty of that before I started in the online world, but I’ve been remote since ’94. Speaking of people, thinking they invented things, everybody thought they invented remote working and I thought I’ve had remote teams since 1994, so it’s not new. I’m going to really miss that because there’s a special culture in the online world, as you know, that is really hard to describe or it’s hard for me to describe but is not like the offline world. It’s like being in a special club, in a secret club. That’s how it feels to me. I know everybody and their brothers online.

[00:18:19] Patrick O’Keefe: I think there might be something to the time you started it.

[00:18:22] Rebecca Newton: Yes, maybe.

[00:18:22] Patrick O’Keefe: I’m sure it felt like even more of a special club in ’94, probably.

[00:18:24] Rebecca Newton: Oh, yes, oh, yes. It was like being a deadhead, like you saw somebody on the street that had a little bear on their shirt over there.

[00:18:31] Patrick O’Keefe: Now, there’s this pushback against it, right?

[00:18:33] Rebecca Newton: Right.

[00:18:34] Patrick O’Keefe: From major corporations to push people back to the office. They’ve got real estate that needs people in it, not as long as you certainly, but as long as I’ve been working, I’ve also been remote. I prefer it. Going to the office is interesting and I’ve seen some beautiful offices here in LA, and I would go once or twice a week maybe for meetings and things, but I’m never more productive than when I’m at this desk right now.

[00:18:54] Rebecca Newton: Amen to that. I am with you 100%. I don’t know how anybody gets anything done in an office, but I did like going to London and going to the offices there a lot, but I wouldn’t have wanted to do it full-time. I love working from home. There’s this whole culture of working remotely and getting things done and collaboration. That’s probably, now that I think about it, that’s what I’m going to miss, is that collaborative environment every day of problem-solving, building a better mousetrap, whatever it is that we were working on. Is getting everybody together and it’s probably the equivalent to getting really good at an online game because you have to learn how to communicate differently. You have to learn how to be patient.

Well, now we have Zoom, but nobody wants to Zoom all day long. I’m going to miss that collaborative, daily, what are we going to fix today? What are we going to discover today? Because there’s also, as you know, a lot of discovery in the online world that will never end. That’s the cool thing. That’s why we’re all in it, right?

[00:20:01] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:20:01] Rebecca Newton: Because it’s not like, “Okay, now I’ve learned everything about the online world, so what am I going to do next?” That was the very thing that got me to leave a lucrative job with great benefits and go to AOL from basically nothing. I thought, “Oh, this is never ending. This is the infinity of discovery, creating, building, collaboration work.” That’s true, it will never stop in the online, in the digital world. I’m going to miss that collaboration, I think, more than anything else I like.

[00:20:33] Patrick O’Keefe: What won’t you miss?

[00:20:35] Rebecca Newton: Oh, boy, I won’t miss all the seeing the same behaviors. I think the thing that I’ve seen happen the most over and over and over is people in the startup have a great idea. It’s really good. Everybody’s working together. Everybody’s excited. Everybody’s got this momentum. There’s this amazing momentum going on.

You make the thing, it works, it gets big and then people come in from the outside. I saw this happen at AOL, and outside, I don’t mean like you’re an outsider, but people that don’t use the product, don’t understand the community, don’t understand the user, all those things, but they’ve got an MBA from UPenn or whatever. Maybe they got lucky at working someplace for a year. People are like, “Oh, yes, I’m going to get so and so. He was over at Meta, or she was over at Meta, and she was at–

[00:21:30] Patrick O’Keefe: Netscape.

[00:21:30] Rebecca Newton: Yes, Netscape. Yes, there you go. [laughs]

[00:21:33] Patrick O’Keefe: In the thought of the era.

[00:21:34] Rebecca Newton: Yes, that’s good. Then you start seeing that the people who are making decisions, or all the people who built the widget, the thing, and understand the thing, the game, whatever, are making decisions in a vacuum. I know that doesn’t sound fair, but that’s what I’ve seen over and over. It’s a bell curve, and I can spot it a mile away now.

I’d go in and say, okay, yes, I’d really like to come work here. Now I’m going to tell you all the things that we should never do that went wrong at the last place after its seven years of great success. Then everything starts.

There is the seven-year product, shelf-life thing. You have to stay ahead of it. When you start bringing people in who don’t use the product, and, therefore, they don’t really understand it, how can they make decisions about what should happen with that product? Every single time they do something that upsets the users, and I don’t mean never change the product, but not respecting your constituents, your stakeholders, your supporters, listening to them and paying attention to them, and that means talking. That’s one of the things I loved about community people is that we were all on the front line. We were every day in there with it. We were in it every day.

Then all these people making decisions weren’t even in it. They were looking at data. Data is important. I love data. I look at it every single day. I just love it, but it’s got to be within the context. I won’t miss people naively, not on purpose, well, one time on purpose, but most of the time in my career, I’ve only seen one time where somebody or some entity was malicious, and that’s pretty good for 30 years. People naively just like thinking that they know better than everybody who built the widget. I’ve heard the conversations. “Oh, they can’t let go. They don’t know how to let go. They don’t know how to grow. They don’t know how to do this.”

Then I would think, “Okay, well, we’ll see who’s not growing in a year, so I’m going to go looking for another job because I know in a year this thing’s not going to exist.” I’m not going to miss that. I guess in the perfect world, I would’ve stayed someplace 30 years and said, “What, aw, this has been an amazing 30 years.” I’m happy that I had the experiences that I’ve had because it’s been fascinating.

The learning was unbelievable all the way, starting from eWorld, when Apple had eWorld, all the way to now being at Epic, which is very different from any place I’ve ever worked. Very different. I love all the experiences, I know, especially the people, but I’m not going to miss– I won’t blame it on executives. It’s not always executives, but let’s call it senior managers who really don’t know what they’re doing and don’t have enough self-awareness to, but I really believe that they do, right?

[00:24:33] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:24:33] Rebecca Newton: There’s a whole lot of back-padding from people who are like, “Oh, yes. No, that’s a great decision.” “No, it’s not.” People don’t know how to say that to somebody who’s a C something O [laughs], right?

[00:24:47] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:24:48] Rebecca Newton: That’s something I want to talk about in my book or podcast or something. I’m going to have to be very careful because I don’t want to offend anybody. Because I’m really not bitter about anybody or anything. Because it’s never about a person, right? It takes more than one person.

I’ll bring up one example. One place that I worked, there was somebody who was in charge, and, in my opinion, they were way out of their league. They did not have the experience. Very smart, highly intelligent person, but didn’t know about scale. That’s the whole thing. That’s an art, to know how to deal with scale. They didn’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. You come from a big place, and you think, “Oh, yes, I know about scale.” You don’t know squat. If you don’t go from 100,000 to 12 million in 6 months, you don’t know anything about scale or whatever it is.

They were told, “Whatever it takes, whatever it takes, whatever it takes.” I thought, “Oh, boy, don’t bite that bait.” They did whatever it took, but they didn’t quite know what they were doing, but neither did anybody else. Now, did they ask anybody who had done this 500 times? No. Instead they were like building it. “Oh, we’re going to build this because we’re the only people that know how to do this because we’re the biggest people in the world.” Then all this money was wasted and spent, and people’s time was wasted, and the whole thing wasn’t well coordinated. Not any one person’s fault.

Then that person takes the hit as, “Well, why did you let that happen?” “Well, you said whatever it took. You gave me all this data that didn’t turn out to be true, but they didn’t have enough experience to know to say, ‘Oh, you know what, this needs to be organic, especially building community.'” I’m sure you’ve had experiences like this, but I remember way back in 2000, I was working at a place called iCAST. This was long before anybody was doing this. It was a music community for trying to get music online and stuff. It was out of Boston. I left AOL and went to iCAST.

The person there, she was opening something like 200 chat rooms before we were even launched, the Britney Spears chat room, the Julio Iglesias chat room. I don’t even remember who was doing what in 2000. I said, “No, no, no, you’re going to have two people in every single room and then somebody’s going to come to that room and see two people and leave.” No, that’s like opening 1,200 Christmas stores on the same block at the same time. I could just go on and on. That to me is fascinating to see how people take the fall because they don’t know any better, and how people don’t ask you, me, a hundred people that we know out there about, “Hey, tell us about your experience,” before they do something.

That, I’m going to give accolades to Michael Acton Smith at Mind Candy, who in 2007 was the first person and the first company that hired me as– I was a director of community or something at first, and then I was the chief community officer, which was really a big thing for me before they even built anything. It was like, “Oh, my God, here’s somebody who really gets it,” instead of, “Oh, yes, we’ll build all these things and then we’ll hire the community manager and the team.” Then the team comes in and it’s like, “Well, we can’t really do this because these tools are like–” “Well, sorry, you’re stuck with them.” No, I’ll quit talking. That, to me–

[00:28:11] Patrick O’Keefe: No, no.

[00:28:12] Rebecca Newton: That was a really big moment, shift. I was like, “Okay, here’s somebody who really gets it.” He always respected me and my team, and the whole company did. I love that. I really love that because we were always at the bottom of the totem pole of every place up until 2007. Not so much at Sulake, they were pretty respectful of me, but not the way Michael Acton Smith was. That really opened the doors for like, let’s make this a profession, which, as you know, many of us have been working on for a long time.

[00:28:46] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes, I think a lot of us have interviewed for roles where we’re asked to play chef with someone else’s ingredients. Yes.

[00:28:51] Rebecca Newton: Absolutely.

[00:28:54] Patrick O’Keefe: There’s only so many ways to make a soufflé if you don’t got the stuff. Also, it’s interesting when you talk about this person takes the fall. They came in and they made these choices. They take the fall, but ultimately, sometimes they take out teams, they take out companies. They take out jobs with them. I really think that a lot of the time, at least in my experience, is that those sorts of things are tied to this unhealthy focus on growth. I interviewed for a job a while back and I got the description, and they were throwing dollar signs out there that I’d be surprised if they actually were going to get me.

It was like, I got that job description and it was high growth, high growth. I was like, “I don’t think I’m who you want. I don’t like that terminology. You’ve got to grow a certain way.” I think that pressure to grow, that’s very startup and VC-driven in my experience. The need to go public, the need to be a unicorn, the need to reach a certain number in order to satisfy someone, instead of just the people that you serve or the people you have now is what pushes you to say, “Oh, wow, that person worked at Pinterest. Let’s bring them over to this community product and let’s see what they could do to pump in users.” Then I don’t want to say it doesn’t always work, but I think more often than not, it probably doesn’t work.

[00:30:05] Rebecca Newton: Well, it can’t because then there wouldn’t be such thing as a unicorn if everybody’s a unicorn, right?

[00:30:10] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:30:10] Rebecca Newton: That’s business in general and it drives me nuts in the offline world as well. It’s like, if you want to be a unicorn, don’t do what everybody else is doing. That’s not going to make you a unicorn. Well, I’ve seen that as trends every decade as well. In 2000, everybody wanted to be the next millionaire, billionaire because of what was happening over at AOL and other.

Then about June or July of 2000, when everything went down in the tubes and stuff, and then again this happens again about six years go by or seven years go by and everybody’s making a lot of money again. It’s like a wave of an ocean. I like what you said about that was an unhealthy perspective about growth. You can’t create that. You have to create the thing that attracts that, but you can’t actually create the growth, right?

[00:31:01] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:31:01] Rebecca Newton: That’s why community people are so important. They can, a really good community team can. I remember in 2000 when dentists were, “Oh, do I need an online community?” There was a trend of, “Oh, it’s online community,” because of the success at AOL and stuff. I was like, “No, you’re a dentist.”

[00:31:18] Patrick O’Keefe: You just need a good website.

[00:31:20] Rebecca Newton: Yes, that’s it. [chuckles]

[00:31:20] Patrick O’Keefe: That’s hard enough. Most of them don’t have it now.

[00:31:22] Rebecca Newton: Yes, That’s right.

[00:31:23] Patrick O’Keefe: I want to talk about regulation. You started before COPPA, before the Communications Decency Act, and Section 230.

[00:31:30] Rebecca Newton: Oh, right.

[00:31:31] Patrick O’Keefe: Those are just a couple of pieces of US legislation and you’ve built community globally. What do you see as the most harmful legislation to our work during your time? What do you see as the best?

[00:31:45] Rebecca Newton: Ooh, that’s a big one. It’s always a two-sided coin from my perspective. I’d say the most, harmful maybe is not the word that I would use, but–

[00:31:55] Patrick O’Keefe: Negative. You can use whatever you want.

[00:31:56] Rebecca Newton: Or something that non-effective is a better word. I think the intention of the GDPR, and I was heavily involved in that many years ago, back in 2008, 2009 in Belgium and I was at meetings about that stuff. I think the intention is great, but again, it’s overdoing it. It’s like the transparency report in the UK, which is a big thing now. The DSA and all that stuff.

If they overdo it, and I’m telling you, I know what’s going to happen with all these reports, they’re going to sit in somebody’s inbox who’s going to be overwhelmed and say, “I can’t even get to all these,” or they’re going to be sick, or they’re going to hire 27 people because people don’t like it after a week. “I can’t do this work,” whatever it is. I think that overregulation is a better way for me to put it.

I don’t think there’s just one thing. Even COPPA, which started out again with good intentions, but then they didn’t enforce it forever. It was hard. How are you going to enforce something that nebulous? I don’t know if you’ve read it word for word, but boy have I, and it’s particularly written to be nebulous so there’s wiggle room for everybody. There was no enforcement, which didn’t help anybody.

Then there was like this enforcement, okay, so to answer your question, the point of COPPA was to not invade people’s privacy, but the only way to accomplish that was to invade everybody’s privacy. It was like, what? I remember one time having a conversation with, I’ll leave their name out, but one of the two people that wrote COPPA years ago, and they were trying to get in the game of how do we get parent verification, verified parental consent without people faxing things?

That’s what they were doing. Nobody wanted to fax anything. There would be two parental consent forms for every 500,000 users. They said, “Rebecca, what do you think about using Skype?” There aren’t enough people in the universe to keep up with all those, you go to World of Warcraft and there’s a million users a day coming in there and you’re wanting to get parents to come Skype, and how do you even know if it’s the parent? All of that stuff.

That goes back to people making decisions who don’t understand the culture or didn’t understand the online world. I’m not saying anything about how smart they are, about how great their intentions were or their abilities in the world. If you’re not in there, if you’re not a heavy user, if you’re not in the kid’s world using it, how can you possibly do it? That’s what we see in the Great Britain, in the EU. Something happens to one person under 16, they want to have 27 laws about it. Because this thing happened.

When you look at the raw, the real numbers of offline crime, and I did a whole paper on this a long time ago, but online crimes against children versus offline crimes against children, it’s so much more prevalent offline, but in the online world– Here’s my theory. We talked about a lot of things, but I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about this.

I think the reason that people spent so much energy and time in the online world of legislation and safety was because it’s so far removed from your own backyard, your own community, your own school, your own church, your own doctor, whatever. That’s something through the internet and the ethernet that happens way over there in another country one time. Let’s just legislate the heck out of that and not worry about the 23 kids in the community who are being abused, neglected, whatever it is.

To me, and I spent a lot of time talking to parents and law enforcement and teachers about this over the years. Stop being afraid of the online world. It’s not nearly as dangerous as the offline world in terms of physical harm. I don’t mean in terms of information that nefarious people share, or bullying, or harassment. That’s a whole thing. That’s real, all of that.

The actual reality of how many people, let’s say under 12, meeting some rando online and getting to Seattle when they live in Austin is pretty rare, if at all, that it happens.

It’s not like pedophiles are jumping out of every bush and finding kids online and your kid is walking to school and then somebody from the other side of the country just came all the way down to snatch him. That just doesn’t happen, or it’s extremely rare. You have a better chance of getting hit by a bus than you do of that happening. To me, that over legislation of things that aren’t effective. In fact, they’re bureaucratic and that over and over and over. That of something that’s reasonable. What really works for a parent?

What works as a parent? It doesn’t work to over-regulate so much that kids can’t move, or play, or talk, or communicate, or build together, collaborate.

Disney years ago, and I’m going to just use their name, but they had something called Virtual Magic Kingdom that we built in 2004, and it was only supposed to be around for three months. It was around for four years, and I was at Habbo, and we built that for them, and they had lawyers, as usual, running the company. I’ve seen that again. Shakespeare was right. First, kill all the lawyers, but nobody could say anything like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck. Nobody could use those names in their usernames. Nobody could have free chat.

It was all hand chat. Then when they opened it, it was a whitelist what they now call– I can’t remember what it’s called, but they used to be called whitelists.

Kids made up their own language, which we said. They’re going to make up their own language because humans need to communicate. The prisoners of war, The Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War weren’t allowed to communicate, and they learned how to communicate by tapping on the walls. They created a whole language over seven years doing that.

That’s what humans do. Kids made up a new language. They went out and got themselves a website and told everybody at school, “Go to this website and learn the language.”

They had their own language. We were trying to moderate this stuff and it was like what are they saying? We had to go figure out what’s their language. That’s the thing of over-regulation. That’s what happens, is that then people can’t collaborate and they either leave your site, your product, your game, whatever, your app and don’t go there because they want to collaborate. That’s the biggest thing I learned about working with kids. The very first thing when they get online or game in an app, whatever is, “I want a job. Can I have a job? Let’s do this together. Let’s do that together.”

Everything is about creating and collaborating. Those two words were my mantra working with kids because they wanted to– Adults want to do the same, but kids were very open about it. “I want a job. Anybody have a job? Anybody want a job? Job, job, job, job, jobs. Great, great, great, great, great, great. What’s your name? What’s your name? What’s your name? Where do you go to school? Blah, blah, blah. I think the over-regulation is detrimental. I think all it does is create a whole lot of jobs for people to do a lot of stuff that nobody’s ever going to look at. That’s a really rude thing for me to say, but I believe that.

[00:39:26] Patrick O’Keefe: I still have signed COPPA forms from when I was a teenager on managing forums in my file cabinet from ’02, because I’m still afraid. I don’t know. Maybe someone will come knocking one day and I’ve got, I don’t know, 10 of them and they sit in my file cabinet. It’s like, “Who knows?” If you took the effort to sign this form and write your parent’s name and mail it to me, it showed up in my P.O. box, so you’re in. I don’t know what to tell you.

[00:39:55] Rebecca Newton: That’s so funny.

[00:39:56] Patrick O’Keefe: Is there a piece of legislation you think of positively that actually was effective. Is there something that was helpful?

[00:40:02] Rebecca Newton: Oh, you did ask me that.

[00:40:03] Patrick O’Keefe: It’s okay if you want to say no, but like–

[00:40:05] Rebecca Newton: No, I’m going to say yes and no to all of those GDPR, DSA, all of that. I’m going to say no because they over-regulate and the people that were creating it didn’t know what they were creating, didn’t know enough. Now, at least in the UK and the EU, they went and asked experts. They did. They were really good about that. The FTC did not until it was after they’d already written everything. The good thing about all of that legislation is that it made people accountable.

It made website operators, owners, app developers, owners accountable because, as we know, some developers or companies, not the people themselves, not the developers, but some app developers, meaning an entity, were creating or do create games that are purposely addictive. Which is not good for kids. I’ve seen that with my own grandchildren, they’re now 20 something. I saw them when they were young, just the hell that the family went through with them being so addicted to certain games. We’ve seen that with adults, with different various communities and games and stuff. It makes those people and hold people accountable.

That’s the good thing about government regulation, is that in any country, any place, is that there’s something you can point to and say, “We decided this, you’re not complying, you’re going to be punished for that.” I do appreciate how much time and energy and effort is spent on legislation. I really do. I’m not anti-legislation at all. I think it keeps the internet safe. I wish that there was regulation in the right places like, hey, it’s really not okay to be putting videos up, in my opinion, of people getting beheaded. Why does anybody ever, ever need to see that unless you’re in special ops and working for the CIA or MI5 or whatever, OPP in Canada, why? Kids can now access that.

That is where if I was going to get back into that game of working with legislators, it is really not okay to have people just upload anything and throw your hands up and say, “It’s too big. We don’t know how to do anything about it.” Yes, you can. There is software out there now for everybody and everything. There’s no excuse to say, “Oh, free speech,” and all that stuff.

[00:42:34] Patrick O’Keefe: I hear you, but I don’t know if you heard there is this guy, Elon Musk. I think he has a lot of good ideas.

[00:42:40] Rebecca Newton: I’ve heard of him. That’s my pain point for parents and kids and law enforcement and teachers to have to deal with the things that kids see online. It’s unconscionable, some of it. I hold those companies responsible for that. They said, “Okay, well, what are we supposed to do about it?” If I open a restaurant and somebody comes in and hits you over the head every day, I better either get security or close my damn restaurant. I don’t have any business running a restaurant that I can’t keep people safe in, or a kids’ camp or whatever it is that I do. Why is that any different? Why is it okay for Meta and YouTube to say, “We’re just too big, we can’t keep up with it.” Okay, then I guess you need to do something.

[00:43:27] Patrick O’Keefe: I guess you’re too big then. [laughs]

[00:43:28] Rebecca Newton: Yes, exactly.

[00:43:30] Patrick O’Keefe: I agree with you. It’s funny because with legislation, I’m always less concerned about the Metas of the world and more like the teenager who wants to start a forum because that was me, right?

[00:43:40] Rebecca Newton: Yes.

[00:43:40] Patrick O’Keefe: That’s why I do this work, because once upon a time, I started moderating a forum when I was 13 and I started launching some when I was 15 and I did the best I could and I grew pretty responsibly. It didn’t get out of hand. I always worried because a lot of legislation, and I’m not saying it’s a good thing necessarily that legislation, bad legislation is bad legislation, whether you have 15 million monthly active users or you have one, but still, Meta has more resources than I did.

[00:44:04] Rebecca Newton: Yes.

[00:44:05] Patrick O’Keefe: I’d less worry about them. Thinking about that and I think about what does that future teenager look at? I was curious, and this is a big question, so feel free to punt on it. As you think about the future right now where we’re at, when I say, what worries you? Is there something that jumps out? This is a two-parter also because I’ll ask you also what gives you hope that jumps out. What worries you?

[00:44:26] Rebecca Newton: What worries me? I don’t have any problem with AI. I don’t have any problem with progressive technology at all. I have a problem with not taking responsibility for whatever you’re building. I’m thinking, “Oh, wait a minute. Okay, so this might happen.” For instance, I am up at night sometimes thinking about kids and AI and what can happen now because it has already been proven or tested and that sort of thing that you can take a voice clip of somebody’s voice and turn it into their voice because we have all these tools now.

You can eventually, not far from now, take their face. You could be thinking you were on Zoom with your kid and it’s not your kid, it’s some other kid who’s setting up your kid to get into huge trouble and young people don’t understand about consequences. They haven’t even got their frontal lobes developed until they’re 21.

[00:45:21] Patrick O’Keefe: 25, I think.

[00:45:22] Rebecca Newton: Maybe it’s 25. If somebody takes my grandson’s face and his voice and creates a whole artificial thing to get him in trouble of something that he didn’t even do, that kind of stuff worries me or gets him in trouble in some other way. Then when I go down that rabbit hole of, oh, my God, what could happen and how would a parent know and we’ve got to educate parents and law enforcement and not to take things at face value, and, oh, my God, next thing it’s Minority Report, and then we’re going to have to have people’s eyeballs and I go nuts.

Then I think, wait a minute, for every problem that we create from our beautiful world of technology, and it is beautiful, for every problem that’s on the opposite side of whatever the good technology coin, somebody always comes along to fix that problem or to work on it. There’s always somebody. It’s a constant fix, build, fix, build, fix, build, fix, build, fix, build. Oh, now this terrible thing can happen. Somebody’s going to come along and say, “Oh,” then we’re going to fill that gap of the nefarious stuff by creating a software that detects whether it’s really that kid or really that person, that parents will have something that they can press. Or like in the early days when everybody was getting ripped off at AOL, everybody. We had read letter, everything, nobody read it, everybody was giving their passwords away. They’re still doing it. Not at AOL, but maybe at AOL.

[00:46:48] Patrick O’Keefe: What a time, though, because like you would fall for, what’s the cliched thing? The Nigerian prince or whatever, like the cliche. People actually fell for this once. That’s why it still happened.

[00:46:56] Rebecca Newton: They’re still doing it. They’re still doing it, but then we got those fobs because they were getting employee accounts at AOL and we were like, “How are we going to do this?” We got these cool digital fobs that sat at our desks and changed numbers every 10, 20 seconds. If you logged off, you had to put that number in. It was just super security. I guess what I’m getting at is that that keeps me up at night, the AI stuff because of the vast potential for really nefarious stuff, but I know that there’s people they’re probably already working on saying, “Okay, we got to think about this.” Always leaves a hole for somebody to come in and fix it.

[00:47:37] Patrick O’Keefe: Well, and real quick it’ll probably be people outside the company. These companies already want to be immunized from copyright infringement, which isn’t the same. They want to be able to suck in all this data, art, music, to produce these things and then not be held accountable-

[00:47:51] Rebecca Newton: That’s right.

[00:47:51] Patrick O’Keefe: -if say they just suck in my book, for example, and now they have the answers to whatever, some of the answers to community, like whatever it is, they don’t want to be held accountable for that. How will that appear to behavior and that sort of abuse? I’ve told my parents and my in-laws and if I ever call you and I say I’m in trouble or I want money and it’s me, it sounds just like me, don’t give me anything. It’s not me. I’ll never ask you for anything like that. I’ll never ask you for– just don’t do it. Just assume if I ever ask you for anything- [crosstalk]-

[00:48:20] Rebecca Newton: That’s fair.

[00:48:20] Patrick O’Keefe: -just assume it’s someone else.

[00:48:22] Rebecca Newton: No, that’s good advice.

[00:48:23] Patrick O’Keefe: You got to answer that. You have this belief that solutions will come. That gives you hope. I’m sure.

[00:48:28] Rebecca Newton: Well, I also have hope in that I know that technology makes our world better. It just does. Think about all the people that have access to knowledge that didn’t have access before. I know there’s still a whole lot of people that don’t. There’s the digital divide and all that, and I’m not discounting that, but it’s a hell of a lot better than 30 years ago. We have these ways, oh, well, think about like how we get information about what’s happening in the rest of the world instantly and real information.

We also get the fake news and a lot of that, but we get real information and how that’s changed the world, in some ways, it’s scary, but it’s also beautiful, all those ways that people share instantly and collaborate and create. I have a lot of hope. Even if we turn into chips and we aren’t human anymore, I think that that will happen eventually. I think we will evolve into machines.

[00:49:23] Patrick O’Keefe: That Elon guy has a company that wants to put a chip in your brain. Like I said, he has a lot of good ideas. I think we should trust him.

[00:49:30] Rebecca Newton: I do have a lot of hope. I love technology and I love what it has done for our world.

[00:49:37] Patrick O’Keefe: I like to say that online communities have changed the arc of my life. They’ve given me a profession. They’ve given me more than half of my closest friends – people I’ve met in online communities – and they are the reason I know my wife. I can slip into the analytics and the business and ROI and all that stuff, but deep down, I am someone who really believes in this value that they have because I’m a person who’s received that value and our friendship-

[00:50:00] Rebecca Newton: Yes.

[00:50:00] Patrick O’Keefe: -is an example I value too. I want to end here. I said we’re going to come back to legacy. What do you see as your legacy?

[00:50:08] Rebecca Newton: Oh, what a great question. I’d like to say two things. I think the contributions I’ve made towards online safety for children in particular, and all the governments I’ve worked with and that sort of thing. I think I’ve made a difference in that respect because I wasn’t afraid of the internet. I think that was a differentiator for me and a couple of my colleagues where a lot of other people that jumped onto the ambulance chasing wagon of, “Oh, online child safety. Yes, it’s a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. Poor me.”

I wasn’t from that, it’s a dangerous place world. I feel good about that, but I also really feel good about the years that I spent working to make online community a profession rather than a Wendy’s job. People probably don’t know this, but in the early days, you know this, it was, “Well, why can’t you just go find some college students to just do this for like $5 an hour?” Oh, my God, I heard that all the time. It was like because there are people’s lives here. I feel really good about the importance of bringing it out into the industry as a profession.

I think I was the first chief community officer. I don’t know that that’s right, but I think that that’s right. I don’t think anybody else had used that title before and had been an executive in community and safety. That wasn’t about me. That was about, “Hey, this is legitimate,” right?

[00:51:34] Patrick O’Keefe: Yes.

[00:51:34] Rebecca Newton: This is a legitimate, online safety is legitimate and now it’s like a whole huge industry. Moderators and I think there’s different terms for moderators now, agents or whatever. All of that. It was not considered professional and now it really is. I feel like those two things, I believe I can say with confidence that I had a significant impact on them.

[00:51:59] Patrick O’Keefe: I agree with you 100%. As far as being the first, whether you were the first or not, you were early, I don’t know if you know Jenna Woodul, but at Live World, she had the title. She had the Chief Community Officer title in like ’96-

[00:52:09] Rebecca Newton: Maybe she did.

[00:52:09] Patrick O’Keefe: -but of course, they were an agency, right? Who knows? Can I toss one more at you? Legacy?

[00:52:14] Rebecca Newton: Yes.

[00:52:14] Patrick O’Keefe: We’ve talked before about the progression of the teenagers you knew from your AOL days and how they found relevant career paths and I really believe that one of the core legacies that people leave behind is how the people that came up under them or that’s a loose coming up under, but people who you helped influence or find their way.

In a professional sense in an office, we have a team, but also like you talk about it’s not a Wendy’s job. Well, those teenagers who found a way, it wasn’t a Wendy’s job for them because they found a career path. I’d honestly throw that at you too, as one more thing that’s part of your legacy.

[00:52:52] Rebecca Newton: I really appreciate that. I should say, I can’t believe I didn’t even think of that, but so it’s because it’s been 30 years, they’re all like 35 or whatever.

[00:53:02] Patrick O’Keefe: You’re being kind to them probably, but yes.

[00:53:03] Rebecca Newton: Yes, might be older. Yes, and I still get emails, especially through LinkedIn where they find me and say, I was so and so at Habbo in 2002 and it’s because of you that I’m in social media or community. One of my closest colleagues and friends now was a Habbo kid who is now the community manager at Scratch, which is an MIT- it’s a really cool community for young kids and one of my grandsons plays it and I mentored him. He wrote me and said, “You probably don’t have time and you probably don’t remember me.”

Well, I do remember those Habbo kids because that was an amazing time. I said, “Oh, yes.” I always loved talking to them. Then I ended up every Friday talking to him on Zoom during the pandemic, sort of mentoring, and then we just became really good friends. Now he’s not just one, I mean, there’s person after person. I appreciate that you brought that up because that is true. The very first person that came to me like that was in 2001. He had been at the VLA, it was a Virtual Leaders Academy at AOL. It was a big deal to be at the VLA.

I had joined the VLA. You had to go through this lengthy process and stuff, and we trained everybody, employees, everybody, but he was 15 and he was the youngest member of the VLA in 1995, ’96. Anyway, he went to college, got this and that degree, he ended up being a chief business officer of EarthLink or someplace like that, and in 2001 he contacted me, and I had just left iCAST after leaving AOL. I didn’t stay at iCAST long.

That was kind of a big disaster. He said, “Hey, Marshall Brain of HowStuffWorks,” which was at that time out of NC State in North Carolina, “needs a community manager. You’re probably not interested, and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m totally interested,'” so he got me a job there. Because of you– not just because of me, but because of something I was part of, he said, “I’m now the Chief Business Officer at EarthLink.” It was a big job. I was like, “This is amazing.” That was my first one. That was 2001.

After that, all these years, I hear it probably once or twice a year from somebody who was either at Habbo or someplace, usually the Habbo kids are the ones that have done very well, because they were in the early days. They were 2000 to 2007. They were creating all this code, they were hacking and stuff, and they were bad. We sort of love the bad kids, because they helped us with our product. They didn’t know it, but they did. I don’t mean bad, like they’re–

[00:55:44] Patrick O’Keefe: Negative. The code wasn’t necessarily.

[00:55:46] Rebecca Newton: They were just creating problems for us. Yes, thank you. I appreciate that, because it means a lot to me. That’s probably more important than anything else, I’d say, honestly, so. That was good for you for bringing that up. Thank you.

[00:55:59] Patrick O’Keefe: Of course. Rebecca, thank you for being you. Thank you for sharing with us today. I think it’s been a really fun conversation. I appreciate it.

[00:56:06] Rebecca Newton: Well, thank you so much for having me and letting me go on and on and on. I appreciate it. I hope we do more of this.

[00:56:14] Patrick O’Keefe: I’m sure we will. We’ve been talking with Rebecca Newton, who is retiring from the commercial internet industry after 30 years. All the while, she has also been a professional musician, and you can find her at rebeccanewton.com. She serves as a treasurer and trustee for ditchthelabel.org and an advisory board member for AgeCheq, which you can find at privacycheq.com. That’s privacy C-H-E-Q.com. For the transcript from this episode, plus highlights and links that we mentioned, please visit communitysignal.com. Community Signal is produced by Karn Broad. See you next episode.

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