In the beginning, a few associates at big law firms gathered in Yahoo! groups to compare and complain about their salaries and firms. Momentum built.
Sniffing steady traffic and thus a steady revenue source, infirmation.com soon created its own bulletin boards and invited the greedy ones to post there. Then there was light.
A bunch of regional and topical sub-boards of "greedy associates" flourished there. They eventually had hundreds of posts per day, and many thousands of page views. Lucrative stuff for infirmation.com.
Most of the posts were rubbish. Some were scatological. Some offensive. Some slanderous. But occasionally there was news. And when law firm news broke (such as the news of the recent demise of Brobeck) the boards were the place to go for instant (if not always accurate) news.
But recently, something happened. I'm not sure what. Everything seems to be shrouded in mystery. The consensus is that infirmation.com has been acquired by some huge corporation, and is suddenly worried about liability.
Anywho, infirmation.com announced out of the blue that it would heretofore delete not only the posts, but the infirmation accounts of all posters who posted anything offensive, including all posts containing either the words "shit" or "fuck." These words had been part of the lingua franca of these boards for years prior to this announcement.
Then, infirmation actually started doing it: deleting not only posts, but the accounts of posters.
So the hardcore greedy ones decided to boycott infirmation.com. They quickly set up an initial alternative message board. But when they tried to post links to the new board on the original infirmation.com boards, the infirmation.com overlords immediately deleted the posts containing the links to the new, competing boards.
Then the new, alternative board's overlords threw the greedy ones out yet again (for reasons that remain unclear), and the greedy ones wandered off into the hinterland once more, in search of a new home. And on it goes.
This may seem somewhat of a tempest in a teapot. But I can tell you that some people are plenty pissed about it. And some are making Herculean efforts to overcome it.
In any event, the new greedy associate boards are here (at least for the moment). (Link updated 2/28/03.)
[You can apply to get email updates about ongoing greedy associates board developments by emailing Tyrone Slothrop and providing him with your board "sock" (anonymous identity) and an email address.]