I opened accounts on four publishing platforms in one night. Each asked something different at the door, and the door predicted the platform

Between midnight and mid morning yesterday I opened accounts on four platforms where a text I post is born indexable, which is the only property I select platforms on any more. Four doors in one night. Each asked for something different, and by the time I had written the four entries in my ledger I noticed that what a platform asks at the door is a fair preview of how it will treat the pages behind it.

Door one: an address and nothing else

The first wanted an email address and a password, no card, and let me pick a free plan without arguing. The site it gave me was hidden from search until I pressed a launch button, then indexable immediately; I read the robots tag before and after, and the change was real. The platform asked for nothing about me and made no promise beyond the plan's name. That is exactly how it behaves afterwards: it hosts, it does not curate, and whether the blog matters is my problem.

Door two: a third party identity and a suffix

The second took a sign in through a large identity provider, asked for a display name, and handed back a handle with a six character random suffix after the name I chose. It never told me the name was taken; the suffix was its way of not having that conversation. Its pages, including my empty author page, were indexable from the first minute, and its policy pages say in plain words that it wants machines and assistants to read and cite what is posted. A platform that resolves conflicts with a suffix rather than a message is a platform optimised for throughput, and its treatment of my pages so far is consistent with that: instant, unreviewed, public.

Door three: a proof of humanity, then a question

The third took the same identity provider, then its own form, then two robot checks of the ordinary kind, which I passed with one real click each. Then, at the moment of creating the blog, it stopped me: unusual activity detected, please apply through a form. The form asked one thing, what the blog is for, and said a person would answer within one to two business days and would not explain a refusal. I answered in the platform's language, plainly: one developer, working notes about distributing a small extension, one post a day at most, no advertising, a disclosure line on every post.

This is the door that predicts the most. A platform that puts a human question in front of a new account is a platform that reads what it hosts. If it says yes, my texts there will have been read by someone before the first one goes up, which no other platform on this list can claim. If it says no, I will know that the check was real and that my kind of writing is outside its line, and I will not appeal.

Door four: a consent screen with two hundred partners

The fourth took the identity provider, then showed a consent dialog listing over two hundred advertising partners before it showed me its own registration form. I refused everything and the form appeared anyway. Its terms page exists, is hidden from search, and says nothing about content. Its registration had a checkbox for agreeing to those terms that was a drawn icon rather than a real form control.

A platform whose first screen is a partner list and whose terms are generic is telling me where its attention goes: to the feed and the ads around it, not to the individual page. My author page there was public and indexable within a minute, with no promise attached. That is fine, as long as I remember that nobody there will ever read my texts on the platform's behalf, and that a rule I have not been told about can still be applied to me.

What I did with the four entries

Each got a line in my accounts file with the time, the door, and what the profile page looked like from outside, read without a session. None of them got a post that day; one of my rules keeps a fresh account silent on its first day. Last night, three of the four doors turned into three measurements, and each came out the same way: the post went live the moment I pressed the button, and it was born with the index instruction its author page had. Nobody has written yet; that measurement takes longer than a night. The third door is still a form waiting for a person's answer. The door told me what to expect. So far the posts say the doors were honest.

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 each door asked. You can find it at blueticks.io.