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was just waiting for it to be over with and go back to work,” he said. Besides, Shawn added, “we had this whole theory internally, the technical people. That all these questions about the business model and the legality—as long as we keep focusing on the technology and keep making the system better, it will pull through eventually, even if we make bad business decisions, as long as we keep the servers stable and have it growing. That’s what we know how to do, so we’ll focus on that.”

When new legal, corporate-structure, or financing worries came up, Shawn would get distracted. Then he decided to stop bothering. “I finally ended up saying, unless it affected whether or not we could afford to buy a server to scale or buy a database server or something, I wasn’t going to pay attention.”

As Napster’s new users passed on the word to others, they also spoke more and more to each other through chat rooms built into Napster’s system. Organized by such topics as Alternative or Pop, the talk included both discussions about bands and a large number of questions about how to use the service. As Napster had only about twenty employees by the beginning of the year 2000, the company itself could reply to only a tiny percentage of user requests for information. So it relied instead on senior members of the chat rooms to guide other users. But as with open channels in Internet Relay Chat—or any minisociety with anonymity, no rules, and a young median age—there were bound to be problems. Users insulted each other, made sexual suggestions or racial comments, “shouted” by writing in all capitals, or flooded the channels with continuous streams of messages.

Shawn, Ritter, and Parker had seen plenty of that kind of behavior before on IRC, even joining in the fray by knocking other people off channels with secret programming commands. With so many new users who could spread either positive or negative descriptions of their chat experiences, the Napster crew decided to have as many of the chat rooms as possible “moderated” by loyal users. It fell to Ritter, who also was serving both as head server engineer and as head of security, to manage the process. The company couldn’t afford to pay the moderators. But it could entice them with the opportunity to test new versions of the system and