I was a Huffington “Poster”child.

Episode 2 in a series of experiences, observations, 'run ins' and general unhappiness with the moderation policies at Huffington Post in particular and posting and commenting to online sites on the web in general.

I was later than some and sooner than others coming into the age of awareness on the whole Huffington Post thing.
I became a member in April of 2008.

My last 'post' being February of 2011, (just a day or so after the $318 million dollar AOL “buy-in” or “sell-out” depending on your point of view) I had a long run that enabled me to successfully have 11,536 comments or posts approved and published on Huff. While I can't validate my “misses” due to deletion by the 'Mods', my number of rejected posts had to be somewhere around...well, a whole bunch... if not equal to my number of hits over the years.

I still have an account there (though I no longer log in) and a modest “following” of “friends” that number 753 other “poster children” out there, just like me and you.

Before anyone might think those stats are exceptional...don't.

There's a small army of people, here and elsewhere (some still there!) who have two, three and four times that amount of posts and “fans” and have spent more, less or equal time than I have in shouting into that empty well several hours a day.

About a hundred or more of these refugees can now be found spread throughout other free speech zones throughout Cybercity. So I think I represent a fairly good example of your average user. Being in said demographic makes me a middle class Huffmerican. And hopefully I can remain fair about some of the sights and scenes I encountered while in that land beyond the rainbow.

Oz or Wonderland?

A quick look at the 'terms of service” for commenting on Huffington could give anyone the impression that they have landed in Wonderland as opposed to Dorothy's Oz. The ambiguities of the conditional terms in conjunction with the “new Badge program” (which you'll learn more about in the course of this series) makes an argument between Tweedledee and Tweedledum look like a debate between professorial intellectuals on this side of the rabbit hole.

I don't know how you feel about it, but the moment I see that a conditional term of service is dependent on nebulous wording such as “appropriate speech” my palms sweat, my throat gets dry and I just know that ideology and not simply civility and courteousness is the tip of an ice berg that will randomly sink any ship's captain attempting to navigate the straits of good posting behavior.

And sure enough, At Huffington Post it repeatedly does.

Working in the lab...

Let me confess to a small social experiment I indulged myself in shortly after the HP-AOL merge.

It was early on reported and speculated upon that the degree of moderation would increase at Huffington in direct proportion to its becoming a major player in the Main Stream Media conglomerate leading to an even more aggressive push to increase the number of “clicks”and “hits” through the manipulation of posts and 'gotcha' headlining.

Let me explain that this way. If you log on to a site, and you can stop by and leave a comment on an article or join a conversational ebb and flow, you may click once or twice, now and again to see if you had any responses or to add to the dialog. On the other hand, if your posts become tied up for a half hour or more in “pending purgatory” before it became posted publicly, you might come back to check on its health or “click” about a half dozen times or more on that same subject for each posting effort you've made. Coincidence? I don't think so.

It was becoming increasingly common to see items with 500 or more posted comments to have a “pending approval” que consisting of sometimes a 4:1 ratio. People would be clicking back like crazy to bitch about it for an hour or more and sending out fresh versions of their comments multiple times before they learned their posts hadn't passed muster and as well, the politically corrected clones sent afterward were ultimately deleted.

Any idea what this does to make a site look exceptionally busy and profit worthy...even if it may not be otherwise? Plenty lucrative ploy just by clogging the pipes.

I had watched over the course of my time on HP that complaints increased exponentially in the comment section regarding these sort of moderation log jams and expulsions and I wanted to somehow measure this from a new perspective other than just living through the limbo called “pending” and deleted posts. So I put my long standing personae (AV) and account to rest and created a new HP account to see how a new member “poster” might fare under these new rules of engagement.

I presented my same ideologies. I was no more literate or less snarky in my replies and originating posts than I'd ever been and my subjects were as random and occasionally off thread as they had ever been under my old account/personae.

Things went par for about three weeks and the accumulation of 47 “friends” and “fans” until I hit an article of above average controversy rife with moderation.

The issue surrounded a video from a police helicopter circling the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11. I was careful not to advance any (“kooky”) theories, either conspiratorial or supporting the establishment's accounts of that day's events. But I stood firm on insisting in “to the point” fashion that there remained in fact, mounds of evidence from that day to this that was never properly investigated or verified. I was fully aware from my HP experience that this sort of speculation was never well tolerated. I suspected that deletions of my posts was bound to follow. Four non confrontational exchanges later, I was informed that I had been banned from commenting. Evidently, a moderator held a different (or corporate) ideology on the subject.

Yes. It was that obvious.

After waiting through three days (of 'crickets') to hear a response from Hufiington Post to my email queries on what exactly my transgressions might have been...even within the broad spectrum of their terms of service, I scrubbed the account completely and bailed.

The punchline is this. Immediately following my canceling of my account I received an email from HP's Admin. They said they were sorry to see me go! Go? For all intent and purposes, I didn't even exist to begin with and it isn't likely that you do either.