1. My Frustrations With HubPages
Now, I don't want to be the one to say anything bad about the HubPages writing platform. I cannot deny that I have had some very good times there, and I have picked up some pocket change here and there for the articles I have published on my HubPages channel through the years.
Nevertheless, the appeal of the HubPages writing platform to writers like me has been fizzling out within the past year, and I simply don't know how else to address the issue other than calling the people behind its operations out on their poor behavior. No, I didn't come here to the PEAKD writing platform to whine but rather to educate my readers on exactly what HubPages is doing wrong in the way that they treat their writers.
Over the course of the past six months, I have submitted high-quality articles to the HubPages editorial board for each of them to be upgraded to a vertical site in the form of Soapboxie, Exemplore, ToughNickel, ReelRundown, The CrimeWire, and Delishably; and they have done nothing more than provide me with nonsensical excuses for rejecting my articles for upgrade to all of those vertical sites.
Last summer there was this one person on the HubPages editorial board who was upgrading almost every article I submitted to her to the Exemplore niche site. Her name was Jennifer. Now, I question whether she has resigned from their editorial board, or perhaps somebody there has a grudge against me and is refusing to allow any of my journalistic talent to be showcased on their vertical sites.
The two most frequent lame excuses that these people on the HubPages editorial board have given me are the following:
- Low Quality:
Unfortunately, your article does not meet Network Site standards. Please review our guide on creating a stellar article for tips on improving your content.
- Relatable Content:
Your article might be deeply valuable to you, your friends, or your family, but not be written in a way that is useful or accessible to a wider audience.
First of all, I have found nothing wrong with the quality of the articles I have submitted to the HubPages editorial board to be upgraded to niche sites. Therefore, I don't know what they mean by "low quality."
Second of all, they never explained to me how they felt that my articles were not written in a way that was useful or accessible to a wider audience. Whenever I have written an article for their writing platform, I've always done so in a way that it has had broad demographics. It appears that they are pulling that excuse off the top of their heads.
As it stands, everything they told me was either subjective or arbitrary or both. Their actions have me so furious that I have considered moving most of my articles over from the HubPages writing platform to the Medium writing platform.
Whenever I have questioned these excuses that the HubPages editorial board have given me, they never seem to give me any direct answers to my questions. I have no problem with criticism; but when it is not constructive, I simply have to call out the individuals who direct it at me. The HubPages editorial board have managed to push me way beyond my breaking point, and now I can no longer remain silent about it.
Other writers on the HubPages writing platform ("Hubbers") have raised similar complaints to mine about this subethical practice on the part of the HubPages editorial board. One Hubber complained that they downgraded one of his articles from a niche site to the regular HubPages writing site inasmuch as they felt that his article wasn't getting enough traffic.
This same Hubber made it a point that downgrading his article from the niche site wasn't going to help the situation at all. He criticized the HubPages editorial board for providing a dumb solution to what they considered to be a problem in that it only reduced the amount of traffic his article was going to receive.
As a result of this stupidity on the part of the HubPages editorial board, their writing platform has lost a significant number of Hubbers in that they have migrated over to other writing platforms that treat them better. I'm seriously contemplating this same course of action myself. I spend way too much time putting together articles for HubPages for their editorial board to treat me so disgracefully.
You want to know what kind of articles I submitted to HubPages to be upgraded to the vertical sites? I submitted articles about daytime talk shows, supernatural phenomena, and Chinese food. All of them were well-written. I double-checked the grammar in them. I even got a whole host of views on each of them. However, the HubPages editorial board thought that they were not good enough for their vertical sites.
Some of you might suggest that I let it go, because, after all, it's their writing platform and they can do as they please with the way they operate it. I'd normally take that piece of advice from you. However, the big problem that I am still having with the HubPages editorial board is that they have upgraded other people's articles to niche sites that weren't even good enough for them to do so.
2. A Misleading Hubpages Article Upgraded To Soapboxie
One of the vertical sites on the HubPages writing platform is named Soapboxie to where I have succeeded in getting articles of mine upgraded. There is this one article there by a Liam A. Ryan that really amounts to nothing more than a sensationalistic piece of propaganda. It is titled "MAPs: Twitter's Problem With Paedophiles."
You can already tell from the title of that same article that it is nothing more than tabloid tripe meant to stir up a moral panic. For that matter, Mr. Ryan should have titled it "Salvadorians: Twitter's Problem With MS-13 Gang Members," because that is the kind of ignorance it promotes.
Now, I don't like to badmouth any of my colleagues on the HubPages writing platform. I also get it that Mr. Ryan published this article shortly before Halloween of 2022 and the HubPages editorial board was not as fickle about which articles they approved to be upgraded to vertical sites like Soapboxie back then. However, they still allow this article to stay on that same vertical site, while they have downgraded some of my articles from that same niche site.
Some of you may even come back to me and tell me to respect Mr. Ryan's opinion set forth in his article, even though I sharply disagree with it. However, I have elaborated on this same subject matter on my HubPages channel, and, for some reason or another, my articles are never upgraded to the Soapboxie niche site no matter how hard I try to get them to be.
There are so many so-called "facts" that Mr. Ryan got wrong in his above-described article that it is not funny. What I will do herein is cite sections of his article and respond to them.
First of all, the terms MAP ("Minor-Attracted Person") and MAPs ("Minor-Attracted Persons" or "Minor-Attracted People") are not even legitimate terms. Mr. Ryan turns his article into a display of ambiguity and uncertainty when he shows examples of Twitter posts therein.
In the post for "TreasureUrMAPS," the 25-year-old account holder there reveals that he is sexually attracted to females between the ages of 8 years old and 17 years old. Well, even if he had stated that he had an age pole of 8 years old to 45 years old, a 25-year-old man flirting with a 43-year-old woman would not automatically turn him into a pedophile.
The Twitter account holder below that same post claims to be a 19-year-old MAP. Well, many 19-year-old men are bound to be attracted to a 17-year-old girl or even a 16-year-old girl, which are both minors. Then again, perhaps his stick is prepubescent girls.
The point that I am trying to make here is that "MAP" and "MAPs" are politically charged labels that set out to fool the Court of Public Opinion into believing that a 20-year-old man who sends his 17-year-old girlfriend a bouquet of flowers is no different from an 82-year-old man who pulls a 6-year-old girl into his car to violate her in every way, shape, and form. These two terms are misleading, and they shouldn't exist.
Jason B Truth's article titled "The Terms "MAP" and "MAPs" Are Politically Incorrect and Dangerous" warns the Court of Public Opinion why the term "MAP" and the likes should be purged from the English language altogether in that they open the doorway to dangers that are not in the best interest of society.
Second of all, in his above-described article, Mr. Ryan stated:
Do you ever encounter the terms 'MAP' or 'AOA' on Twitter or other social media while browsing? These harmless-sounding acronyms are in fact codes used by paedophiles to identify themselves online. 'AOA' stands for 'Age Of Attraction' and 'MAP' means 'Minor Attracted Person'. They were always a presence within the nadirs of Twitter, but paedophiles migrated en masse when Tumblr decided to ban all nudity and 'adult' content from its platform some months ago.
It is quite clear that a significant number of paedophiles and their collaborators on social media are cohesively engaged in a scripted PR campaign to normalize child abuse. Their number one goal—and it's an old one from at least the PIE (Pedophile Information Exchange) days—is to see child abuse made so acceptable that 'P' for paedophilia is added to the gay movements' LBGT acronym ie 'LBGTP'. PIE was actually an affiliate member of the National Council for Civil Liberties* (now Liberty). This is an appalling vista for any decent person to contemplate. It is a sick and factually criminal attempt to dress what most see as the most heinous of crimes being portrayed as an acceptable lifestyle or legal sexual preference.
Okay, Mr. Ryan? If you are reading my article here, let me address the elephant in the room here. Pedophile-rights activists were unsuccessful at convincing the LGBT community to allow them to join forces with them and add the P to make the abbreviation "LGBT" appear as "LGBTP" anywhere in public throughout the Anglosphere. (*Note - Mr. Ryan cited the abbreviation as "LBGT" instead of "LGBT" in his article.) Who can rightfully blame the LGBT community for wanting nothing to do with them?
Well, Mr. Ryan? What do you think these pedophile-rights activists are doing when they attempt to worm their way into the umbrella of chronoastiphilia and change the name of the umbrella to "MAPs"? If you don't know what I'm referring to, allow me to explain. The umbrella of chronoastiphilia includes social constructs like hebephilia, ephebophilia, and certain types of teleiophilia.
Everything that falls within the umbrella of chronoastiphilia is a social construct and has been deemed to be normative by the American Psychiatric Association ("A. P. A."). To be a little more specific, the A. P. A. has not even entertained the notion of whether ephebophilia and age-gap-related teleiophilia are even paraphilias, because they are so common within the English-speaking culture.
Nothing belongs under any umbrella that includes pedophilia except for nepiophilia or infantophilia inasmuch as that also involves a dangerous sexual attraction toward prepubescent children (in the toddler age range). I'm not denying that toxic relationships between adult men and teenage girls do exist.
Nevertheless, nobody can honestly equate someone like Todd Nickerson to Don Johnson or even compare the two men with each other. In case you don't know why I am making this same analogy, let me explain to you that actor Don Johnson has been in love with actress Melanie Griffith on and off from the time she was 13 years old. He is almost a decade older than her.
On the other hand, Todd Nickerson is a self-proclaimed pedophile who admits to have been sexually attracted to a 5-year-old girl. An adult man may fall in love with an adolescent girl as young as 13 or 14 years old and remain in love with her long after she has gotten beyond her fertile years until either he or she dies.
A pedophile who is sexually attracted to children as young as 2 or 3 years old is always going to be the person that he is. He may start out as a young man in accosting little girls who are not even yet thinking about their first kiss, and he may go to prison for a very long time for acting on those same urges. However, when he gets out of prison as an old man, he will still be what he is.
I don't know of any better way to explain all of these facts to convince the Court of Public Opinion that the terms "MAP" and "MAPs" should be removed from the English language altogether. Back in 2013, Dr. Ray Blanchard did exactly as pedophile-rights activists are doing now to conflate pedophilia with mere social constructs related to age-related attractions, and the A. P. A. rejected his efforts for very good reasons.
Whenever someone attends a family reunion and their grand-aunt, Betsy, informs them that she is now 74 years old and her husband, Grand-Uncle Bob, is now 89 years old and that they got married 60 years ago, if that same person is naive enough to believe that Grand-Uncle Bob can be no different from a child molester who rapes and murders toddlers, then they are giving power to pedophile-rights activists inasmuch as pedophile-rights activists want to confuse people in that same manner.
At the end of the day, by publishing his article, Mr. Ryan is actually supporting the main goals of pedophile-rights activists. Adult men who fell in love with their significantly younger wives when these women were in middle school or high school do not want to be associated with serial child rapists in any way, shape, or form.
In his above-described article, Mr. Ryan stated:
Despite their slick social media campaign's attempt to portray us all as somehow 'bigots' for opposing child sexual abuse, some of these deviants list their 'AOA' (Age of attraction) as five years old and even younger! Even worse, many of those who challenge them on social media have had their accounts either partially or permanently banned from the platform.
Mr. Ryan? I am equally as anti-pedophile as you are. Any adult who is sexually attracted to a child five years old and younger is definitely not playing with a full deck. However, if a 14-, 13-, or 12-year-old girl has the physique of a full-figured woman, adult men are bound to notice her in a way that causes them not to see her as a little girl. It's as simple as that.
I am sick and tired of right-wing nuts accusing adult men in their twenties or older of being pedophiles merely for showing a non-Platonic interest in 16-year-old girls, some of who look like models for the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated magazine. These men are not child molesters any more than 17- and 18-year-old boys are for admiring these young girls in a sexual manner.
Mr. Ryan? You are not bringing about public awareness by publishing misleading articles as the above-described one of yours. You're only fanning the flames of the fire that pedophile-rights activists have already started. You are clearly leading the sheep in the wrong direction on this topic.
Also, Mr. Ryan? I don't like Dr. James Cantor any more than you do. He's a spin doctor and a charlatan like Dr. Ray Blanchard. In fact, he and Dr. Blanchard are close friends. Dr. Cantor believes that most left-handed people are pedophiles. Really? My mother is left-handed, and she's not a pedophile.
Dr. Cantor believes that pedophiles have a low IQ. If only that misconception of his were true, law-enforcement officials would have a much easier time catching these monsters. However, once again Dr. Cantor has pitched another one of his snake-oil campaigns.
Dr. Cantor is openly gay. Therefore, I am shocked that he would want the LGBT community to add the P for "pedophile" onto their name as activists. I wouldn't doubt that there are gay activists who would like to excommunicate him from the LGBT community for making such an intellectually bankrupt statement.
Mr. Ryan? I don't know as much about the British government as you do, because I have never lived in the United Kingdom. However, I will candidly state herein that elected officials in the United Kingdom apparently don't have the same thin, white line to walk as American elected officials do on this issue. For that reason, the United Kingdom may get overly permissive laws pertaining to juvenile-justice-related matters, whereas in the United States, it's the opposite.
Mr. Ryan? I guess Dr. Jacqui Dillon is the United Kingdom's answer to John Walsh, for a lack of a better description. I don't doubt that she has always had heroic intentions in her mission to protect the rights of children there in the United Kingdom.
The problem that I am having with Dr. Dillon, Mr. Ryan, is that she subscribes to the same school of thought as you do that the umbrella of pedophilia and nepiophilia (also called infantophilia) should be merged with the umbrella of chronoastiphilia, when it is clear that both umbrellas should never be cross-pollinated inasmuch as one umbrella pertains to dangerous paraphilias and the other umbrella pertains to age-related attractions that usually are nonconformist at worst.
The MAP umbrella should never come to fruition. As anti-pedophile as Dr. Dillon may perceive herself to be, she is walking directly into the trap of pedophile-rights activists who are seeking for naive individuals like her to give them power.
According to Mr. Ryan's above-described article, Dr. Dillon once stated:
This is extremely worrying for parents and those who care about the welfare of children. Let's not forget that children can officially register as Twitter users at only thirteen years of age and many even younger children find ways to circumvent the official age limit. Paedophiles using the cover name of a MAP are active on all social media platforms, not just Twitter.
Teenagers who get involved in relationships with older suitors have nothing to do with pedophiles and child molesters, period! If Dr. Dillon believes so, she cannot truly be an expert on the matter and she is only allowing the tragedies in her past to misguide her from seeing the bigger picture.
If a group of underage boys brutally gang-raped Dr. Dillon as what happened in the Dunbar Village Rape back in 2007 and she was wrongfully charged with multiple counts of statutory rape and aggravated child molestation afterwards because of it, her stance on when childhood innocence actually ends would take a 180-degree turn from what it is now. It's as though these people have to learn how to see the light the hard way.
If Dr. Dillon really wanted to help survivors of child abuse and the likes, she would be fighting to revamp the inheritance laws in her nation to make it illegal for any abusive parent to cut their child out of their will. Perhaps the United Kingdom may have more sophisticated inheritance laws than the United States in that regard; but if they don't, Dr. Dillon could really do good deeds by following that formula.
In his above-described article, Mr. Ryan stated therein:
If you have children, grandchildren, or young siblings who use the internet, which is factually almost 100% of kids in the global north, make them aware of the MAP acronym and other codified language paedophiles use online, such as 'AOA' (Age of Attraction). Let social media giants like Twitter know how you feel about their part in the push to make paedophilia somehow acceptable. Be careful about challenging these MAP perverts online; they are part of a funded PR campaign with one 'controller' able to direct several profiles, so it may falsely seem to you that you are in a minority. As mentioned earlier, you are very much in the majority with billions of people agreeing with you. One of the prime MAP tactics is to attach themselves to liberal, progressive or libertarian causes online, then gradually introduce their twisted and illegal intentions into the agenda.
Mr. Ryan? You word your narratives exactly as a QAnon conspiracy theorist turned domestic terrorist would do so. Your nation (Ireland) has the highest statutory age of consent of any country in Europe. Therefore, I have to wonder if that fact poisons your ability to see this issue from a bird's eye viewpoint as I do. You are engaging in the same lunacy that got Alex Jones into trouble. He's a talented man, but he made the wrong choices as you are doing.
What you should be doing, Mr. Ryan, is warning others that pedophile-rights activists are now trying to do exactly what they attempted to do to the LGBT community. That is, they are wrongfully latching on to the chronoastiphilia umbrella by claiming that they are no different from people with age-related attractions that do not even appear as psychiatric disorders in the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ("DSM-5").
The adoption of the term "MAP" and the likes into the English language has spawned a dangerous level of hypocrisy within the American culture. A good example to this effect is that a couple of years ago, I came across this one female YouTuber here in the United States who ran a campaign against "MAPs" as she called them. I believe her name was Shannon, but don't hold me to it.
Nevertheless, Shannon would run her mouth on camera about how she felt that men over 21 years old who had girlfriends in middle school or high school were no different from a 75-year-old man in a trench coat who stalked preschoolers on a playground. She even falsely accused a male YouTuber of being a pedophile, when she didn't have any evidence to support her allegations against him.
To make a long story short, it later came out to the public that Shannon and her husband had been blackmailing this woman who was the same age as them by threatening her with copies of nude photographs of this same woman from when she was 15 years old. Talk about hypocrisy on steroids. Her moral high horse stinks to high heaven.
I have to ask if Shannon really buys into all of this pedophile-panic propaganda regarding "MAPs," would that be an admission on her part that she and her husband are both pedophiles? I bet you that she and her husband could not answer this same question without turning their heads away in shame.
This woman is such a joke. If I find her YouTube channel again, I will write articles about her and publish them here on the PEAKD writing platform. In any event, I do not find Mr. Ryan to be in control of his mental faculties any much more than Shannon and her husband are.
3. Final Thoughts
I have published high-quality articles on my HubPages channel. Some of my articles delve into the same subject matter as the above-described article by Liam A. Ryan. The difference between my articles and Mr. Ryan's above-described article is that I am brutally honest about setting forth the facts in mine, whereas Mr. Ryan's article contains mostly pedophile-panic propaganda.
Every time I have to respond to someone like Mr. Ryan in an article of of mine of this nature, I feel like jumping into a time machine to travel back to 1885 and throwing the late Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing into a volcano pit to watch the lava devour him alive. Psychiatrists like him are scum. Dr. Ray Blanchard is not much different from him in that he is a self-styled head doctor.
Nevertheless, the HubPages editorial board has refused to upgrade a number of my articles to niche sites, whereas they took no reluctance in upgrading Mr. Ryan's above-described article to the Soapboxie vertical site. I have decided that I will probably eventually move most of my articles on HubPages to the Medium writing platform where they can earn me more money.
If anyone knows how easy it is to earn money on the Medium platform, please do let me know in the comments section below. I want to start really raking in the big bucks if I can. I currently have over 200 articles posted on my HubPages channel.
This Article Is Copyright-Protected
Ladies and gentlemen? It looks as though Liam R. Ryan's article that I described in my above article has been downgraded to the regular HubPages site (Discover HubPages). It is because HubPages has recently eliminated the SoapBoxie niche site. This is both good news and bad news. It is good news, because I don't believe that Mr. Ryan's above-described article was ever worthy of publication on one of HubPage's niche sites. It is also bad news, because I liked getting my own articles upgraded to the SoapBoxie niche site. Oh, well, I will be posting an article about this in the near future.