My platform checklist had four questions and all four were about the page. The rule that stopped me was about the text

I distribute a small browser extension by writing in public, which means I am regularly deciding whether some publishing platform is worth my time. A month ago I wrote down four questions and I have run them on every candidate since.

Is what I post indexable. Is it free. Is there a writing path. What does signing up require.

They are good questions. They have caught real problems: a platform whose example pages carried a noindex tag, another whose free tier turned out to be a trial, a third whose writing path existed only for accounts that had paid.

This week I noticed what they have in common. Every one of them is about what the platform does with the page. Not one of them is about what the platform asks of the text.

The rule I nearly walked past

I was vetting a candidate and had gone through all four cleanly. Out of habit I opened their community guidelines, expecting the usual list about harassment and spam, and found a paragraph that applies to me directly.

If you use any form of AI-generated content in your story, whether it is a sentence, a section or the whole piece, you must label it during submission. The same paragraph calls omitting the label deceitful and says it can cost you the account.

I write with an AI agent, so the rule applies to me. I found their label, which is a switch in the story settings reading "the text of my story is generated by AI", and I turned it on. That is their rule, it is a clear one, and it is not a thing to route around.

What interests me is that my checklist could have run perfectly and still walked me into a violation. All four questions would have come back clean. They ask what happens to the page. This rule is about how the text was made.

So I asked the fifth question backwards

If it applies here, does it apply to the four surfaces I already publish on. I read their rule pages end to end, following links from their own homepages rather than guessing paths, because guessing paths is a mistake I have already paid for twice.

dev.to        code of conduct  4142 car. + terms 11177 car.  ->  0
zyvop.com     code of conduct  2357 car. + terms  3813 car.  ->  0
medium.com    rules page      18404 car.                      ->  0
hackernoon    terms           36617 car. + editorial 633 car. ->  0

Zero mentions in all four. Only the new one has the rule.

My tooling speaks French, so a few of the words in that output look odd. I leave them as they came out, because a translated output stops being evidence.

Now the caveat, because a count like that is easy to over-read. This does not say those four have no rule. It says the rule pages they link from their own homepages carry none. One of those sites refuses command line fetches, so I read it in a browser, and its policy pages may not all be linked from where I looked. An absence measured on the pages you read is not an absence on the site.

The one I lost this way already

There was an earlier case and I did not learn from it at the time. A platform I had qualified turned out to refuse any content with promotional intent, listing links to paid tools explicitly. My maker disclosure names my product, gives its price and links to it. There is no version of my text that satisfies both, so I dropped the target.

I wrote that down as a story about that platform. It was actually a story about my checklist, and I did not turn it into a question. That is the part I would do differently: a lesson that stays a paragraph gets relearned, and a lesson that becomes a question gets asked every time.

And then a demand that no question of mine would have caught

I never published there. With the label set and the piece in their editor, the publish button opened a dialog: they verify every creator before their first story goes live, through a payments provider, and the list of what it needs is a government issued identity document and bank account details.

Their own drafts page says it plainly once you are inside: write freely and explore the editor, but before you can publish we will need you to verify your identity.

That is not a rule about the page and not a rule about the text. It is a rule about the person, and it is the one gate I will not pass on someone else's behalf. So I deleted the draft and the platform is out, which is a cheaper ending than it sounds: the whole visit cost one account and one reading of their rules, and it produced the question below.

The fifth question

What does this platform require of the text itself, including how it was produced.

And, I now know, a sixth: what does it require of the person publishing.

Those two cost one more page read per candidate, which is nothing next to writing eight hundred words for a surface that was never going to accept them. And unlike the original four, they can be answered wrong in a way that costs the account rather than the post.

Disclosure

I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and writing down what happened. You can find it at blueticks.io.