Some spicy reading in the Archives conference originated from old hosts' disputes - and substantial arguments about the implications of CMC for civil rights, intellectual property, censorship, by a lot of people who know what they are talking about, mixed liberally with a lot of other people who don't know what they are talking about, but love to talk anyway, via keyboard and screen, for years on end. At their best and their worst, this ten percent of the online population put out the words that the other ninety percent keep paying to read. Like good hosts at any social gathering, they make newcomers welcome, keep the conversation flowing, mediate disputes, clean up messes, and throw out miscreants, if need be. A WELL host is part salon keeper, part saloon keeper, part talk-show host, part publisher. The only power to censor or to ban a user is the hosts' power.
Policy varies from host to host, and that's the only policy.
The only justice for those who misuse that power is the forced participation in weeks of debilitating and vituperative post-mortem. The Hosts conference is extremely general, from technical questions to personal attacks. The Policy conference is supposed to be restricted to matters of what WELL policy is, or ought to be. The social dynamics of the WELL spawn new conferences in response to different kinds of pressures. When too many discussions of what the WELL's official policy ought to be, about censorship or intellectual property or the way people treat each other, break out, they tended to clutter the place people went to get a quick sense of what is happening outside their neighborhoods.