The Business Glossary · User-Generated Platforms

Account: one login, a person or a business, whatever roles it plays; everything else (mentions, follows, penalties, payouts) keys on its immutable ID, never on its handle (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Account lock: moving an account to locked on a suspected takeover: sign-in refused, payouts held, the handle frozen and outbound messages stopped while recovery runs; a status, not a penalty, so the victim's standing stays clean (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account standing: the user-facing summary of the penalties in force against an account (what it did, which rule it broke, what that restricts and when it expires), derived as a query over penalties rather than stored, and read at the moment of an action by the gates for monetization, badges, moderator roles and higher limits (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account Standing tab: Discord's settings page, shipped in October 2023 with its Warning System, that lists an account's past violations and shows standing determined by active violations and their severity (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account status: whether an account can be used at all, which is about control rather than conduct: active, locked (a takeover or recovery in progress), deactivated (paused by the user) or closed; every penalty, including a permanent ban, is a penalty row instead (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account versus role: the split that one account reads, posts, moderates, streams, books and hosts, so the platform records which role it acted in for each act instead of creating separate accounts per role (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Advertisers: brands and performance marketers buying attention next to user content, who need reach, targeting, measurement and suitability (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Advertising: ads in feeds, conversations, search and video sold by auction; the main business of content platforms (about $2.1 billion of Reddit's $2.2 billion revenue in 2025) (The User-Generated Platform Business).
API and data licensing: revenue from paid API tiers and multi-year content licenses sold to search and AI companies and developers (The User-Generated Platform Business).
ARPU (average revenue per user): revenue divided by users; it varies by region by more than thirty times, as Pinterest's $30.84 in the US and Canada against $0.83 in the rest of the world shows (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Badge: a visible mark on a profile; the rule is one visually distinct badge kind per meaning, each backed by a verification record, so revoking the verification closes the badge (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Bidirectional verification: the AT Protocol check that a handle resolves to a DID and that the DID document claims the handle; a handle failing either direction shows as handle.invalid (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Booking: a guest's reservation of a listing for a period, or a buyer's purchase; confirmed reservations of one listing can't overlap, which an exclusion constraint enforces in the database (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Build, buy or rent: the per-layer vendor decision; the default is to build the community, content and marketplace model and the ranking, and rent video, image delivery, identity verification, payments and insurance (The Platform Landscape).
Charge types: the connected-accounts decision a marketplace makes first, between destination charges, separate charges and transfers, and direct charges; it decides whose balance a refund or chargeback hits and whose name is on the card statement (The Platform Landscape).
Classifier: a model that finds new, unjudged content and returns a score that should order a human review queue, unlike a hash match, which finds copies of something already judged (The Platform Landscape).
Closure: the immediate part of account deletion: sign-in stops, the profile disappears, listings unpublish and the handle stops resolving, while erasure follows later as a job (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Commerce and affiliate: revenue from merchants through shoppable pins, product ads, catalog feeds and affiliate fees on attributed sales (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Community: a space with members, rules and moderators (a forum, a server, a channel or a group), and the unit of scope for membership, rules, moderation and much of the load (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Confusables: characters that look alike across scripts, such as Latin "a" and Cyrillic "а", mapped to one form before the handle uniqueness check so look-alike handles collide (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Connected accounts: a payments platform's product for paying many sub-merchants, which almost every marketplace runs on; Stripe Connect is the commonly documented example (The Platform Landscape).
Content item: anything published that others can see, reply to or report (a post, a comment, a media post, a stream or a listing), carrying an author, a place, a visibility and a moderation state (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Content revision: each version of an item's text as published, never edited; reports and evidence point to the revision they judged (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Creator revenue share: a share of ad revenue on a creator's content, passed through to the creator; YouTube pays 55% of net watch-page ad revenue and 45% of a pooled Shorts allocation (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Creators: people whose content draws the audience (posters, streamers, video makers, artists), who need reach, tools, a way to get paid and a fair hearing when moderated (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Data licensees: search engines and AI companies paying for access to the corpus, who need reliable API access under contract (The User-Generated Platform Business).
DAUq and WAUq (daily and weekly uniques): Reddit's audience measures: 121.4 million daily and 471.6 million weekly uniques in the fourth quarter of 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Delegated verifier: an organization, such as a newsroom verifying its journalists, that grants badges on the platform's behalf; each badge records which verifier granted it, so a verifier's grants can be reviewed and revoked in bulk (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Deletion request: a user's request recorded with its scope (close the account, remove what they published, or erase their personal data), each fulfilled on its own clock (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Destination charge: a charge type where the platform takes the payment and transfers the host's share, which Stripe recommends for marketplaces such as home rentals (The Platform Landscape).
DID (decentralized identifier): a permanent account identifier on the AT Protocol whose document lists the account's current host and keys; the handle is a human-readable name layered on it (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
did:plc: a DID method in which the user can hold rotation keys (on paper, if they like) and repoint the DID to a new host without the old host's help, which is how an account moves (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Direct charge: a charge type where the seller is the merchant and the platform takes an application fee, suited to software platforms more than marketplaces (The Platform Landscape).
Domain handle: a handle that is a domain name, proved by a DNS TXT record at _atproto.<handle> or an HTTPS response at /.well-known/atproto-did and re-checked on a schedule; Bluesky treats it as a form of verification, and over 309,000 Bluesky accounts used one by the end of 2025 (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Erasure job: the background job that walks each record type for a closed account, skips anything under a legal hold or retention window, erases or de-identifies the rest and reports what it removed and kept, re-running when a hold is released (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Federated network: a platform shape where posts live on independent servers that interoperate, read as timelines across servers (Mastodon and the fediverse, Bluesky on the AT Protocol), mostly funded by donations, hosting services and venture capital (The Platform Landscape).
GBV (gross booking value): the total value of bookings made on a rental marketplace; Airbnb reported $91.3 billion for 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
GIFCT hash-sharing database: hashes of terrorist and violent extremist content, labeled by entity, behavior and incident and shared among members with an information-sharing agreement (The Platform Landscape).
GMS (gross merchandise sales): Etsy's measure of the total value of goods sold on its marketplace: $10.46 billion in 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
GMV (gross merchandise value): the total value of goods sold on a goods marketplace; eBay reported $79.6 billion for 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Guests and buyers: the demand side of a marketplace, who need an accurate listing, an all-in price and a refund when it isn't as described (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Handle: a public, mentionable and impersonable name for an account; it's displayed as typed, normalized for uniqueness, and never used as the key other records point at (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Handle history: every handle an account has held, kept as time ranges so old names still redirect and resolve, with a released name held back from reuse for a period (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Handle key: the normalized form of a handle (case folded, confusables mapped) that carries the unique constraint, beside the handle as the user typed it (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Hosts and sellers: people and businesses that list inventory (a room, an RV, a car, a handmade item, a used jacket) and need bookings or sales, payouts on time and protection when something goes wrong (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Identify-then-challenge: Airbnb's sign-in flow in which the user says who they are first and a server-side policy engine picks the challenge most likely to succeed, with a "try another way" fallback; it reported 2.6% more successful authentications and 27% fewer duplicate accounts (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Identity verified: the verification meaning in which a government ID, a selfie or third-party data was checked, shown to counterparties in a transaction (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Legal hold: a record that suspends erasure of named records for a stated reason (a claim window, an open dispute, a CyberTipline preservation, a preservation request, litigation, regulatory retention or tax) until it's released; one from a law enforcement request that forbids notice is never shown to the user (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Life-cycle events: events such as content.published, content.removed, booking.confirmed and account.closed, emitted through the outbox for feeds, search, notifications, payouts and transparency counts to subscribe to (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Listing: the bookable or purchasable inventory side of a listing content item; whether it's visible is the content item's state, whether it can be booked is the listing's status (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Live streaming platform: a platform shape where users supply broadcasts and others consume live video, chat and clips, earning from advertising, subscriptions, tips and virtual currency (Twitch, YouTube Live, Kick) (The Platform Landscape).
Marketplace take rate: service fees charged to hosts, sellers, guests or buyers as a percentage of the booking or sale; Airbnb's revenue was about 13.4% of gross booking value in 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Media asset: an uploaded file with its own processing state, hashes, storage cost and retention, attached to content items; one file can sit in several posts and be kept or purged on a different schedule from them (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Media host: a platform shape where users supply images and video that others consume as galleries, embeds and feeds, earning from advertising and storage subscriptions (Imgur, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo) (The Platform Landscape).
Membership: an account's membership in a community over time, with each join, leave and rejoin a separate range, so whether someone was a member when they posted has an answer (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Moderation case: the playbook's case, report, decision and penalty tables, scoped to a community or the platform and pinned to the content revision that was judged (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Paid checkmark: a badge granted for a subscription rather than a check; the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, 2025, in its first DSA non-compliance decision, finding that X's paid blue checkmark deceived users (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Paid communities: monthly tiers members pay for access to a server, channel or subforum; Discord's Server Subscriptions launched with owners keeping 90% (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Peer-to-peer marketplace: a platform shape where users list stays, vehicles and goods that others book or buy, earning from take rate, seller ads, protection plans and float (Airbnb, Outdoorsy, RVshare, Turo, Etsy, eBay, Vinted) (The Platform Landscape).
Penalty evasion: a banned user returning on a new account, detected by linking accounts to one person (devices, payment instruments, identity documents, behavior) (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Platform shapes: the six kinds of user-generated platform by what users supply and others consume: communities, media hosts, live streaming, chat, federated networks and peer-to-peer marketplaces (The Platform Landscape).
Premium subscriptions: ad-free tiers, perks and badges that users pay for directly (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Profile: a public face of an account (a member, a creator, a host, a seller or a brand), at most one of each kind per account, with its own role-specific state (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Promoted listings and seller ads: paid placement inside a marketplace's own search, sold to sellers; eBay's $1,993 million of 2025 advertising revenue was "primarily" fees to promote listings (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Protection margins: revenue from protection plans priced per trip, host plans that trade take rate for deductible, and deposit waivers (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Protection plan: contractual protection a rental marketplace sells beside third-party insurance, such as Turo's host plans, which are contractual reimbursement and "not insurance" (The Platform Landscape).
Re-verification: checking identity again after a change of legal name or other account information, or on detected risk; Airbnb blocks new reservations, or the host's calendar, until it's done (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Regulators and law enforcement: the FTC, state attorneys general, the European Commission and national coordinators, Ofcom, eSafety, the ICO, NCMEC as the US reporting channel, police and courts, who need reports in their format, notices answered on their clock and records on demand (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Remote account: an account from another federated server that a server keeps rows for and moderates locally (limit, suspend) but can't delete at its home (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Reserved handle: a name held back from registration: brand and public-figure names, staff-like names such as "admin" or "support", names of banned accounts and recently released handles (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Role: a named set of community permissions with a rank, held through memberships; platform staff use separate grants, never community roles (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Role-scoped penalty: a penalty that names the role it restricts (host, guest, member, moderator and so on), so a host who cancels repeatedly loses instant book or visibility rather than the account; sitewide suspension is reserved for conduct that makes the person unsafe in every role (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Seller subscriptions: monthly plans with tools and credits sold to sellers, such as Etsy Plus at $10 a month (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Separate charges and transfers: a charge type where the platform charges first and decides later whom to pay, for multi-party or not-yet-assigned orders (The Platform Landscape).
Step-up: requiring a recent strong factor before actions where value or identity moves: changing the payout account, email, phone or handle, adding a co-host or moderator, transferring a community's ownership, or starting a stream with a new key (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Stream: a live broadcast's state (scheduled, live, ended or interrupted) and its recording, kept beside the stream's content item (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Strike: on YouTube, a violation after the first warning; each strike lasts 90 days, the first freezes posting for a week, the second for two weeks, and a third within 90 days can remove the channel (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Tipping and paid messages: one-time fan payments such as Super Chat, Super Thanks, Bits and tips; YouTube passes 70% of fan funding to the creator (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Trusted Verifier: an organization Bluesky authorizes to verify accounts, whose badges are scalloped and name the organization that granted them; 21 Trusted Verifiers had verified 777 accounts by the end of 2025 (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
User-generated platform: a platform where users supply what others consume (posts, media, streams or listings) and the platform makes those contributions findable, safe enough to use and worth paying for, while taking a cut, selling ads, or both (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Users: people who read, watch, buy, book and occasionally post, often logged out, who need something worth their time, safety and control over their data (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Vendors: video, CDN, identity, insurance, payments and trust and safety providers that integrate with the platform and receive its data under their terms (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Verification: a record of what was checked about an account, by whom (the platform, a vendor or a delegated organization), with what evidence and for what period; "verified" can mean identity checked, authentic and notable, controls a domain, or paid (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Virtual goods and currencies: awards, boosts, cheers and gifts users buy with a platform currency; no platform in the survey breaks out the revenue (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Volunteer moderators: users who run communities (forum moderators, server owners, channel mods) and need tools, automation and a platform that backs their decisions (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Volunteer versus platform moderation: the split that on community platforms most removals are made by users, not staff; Reddit's report for the second half of 2025 attributes 52.7% of removals to moderators and 44.7% to admins (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Warning: on YouTube, what a first violation usually gets; it expires after 90 days if the creator completes a policy training, and later violations become strikes (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
WebFinger: the lookup that resolves a Mastodon user@domain handle: the server asks the domain's /.well-known/webfinger endpoint for the acct: URI, follows the self link to the ActivityPub actor, then looks up again from the actor's own username and host to confirm they match (Accounts, Identity & Standing).

Account: one login, a person or a business, whatever roles it plays; everything else (mentions, follows, penalties, payouts) keys on its immutable ID, never on its handle (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Account lock: moving an account to locked on a suspected takeover: sign-in refused, payouts held, the handle frozen and outbound messages stopped while recovery runs; a status, not a penalty, so the victim's standing stays clean (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account standing: the user-facing summary of the penalties in force against an account (what it did, which rule it broke, what that restricts and when it expires), derived as a query over penalties rather than stored, and read at the moment of an action by the gates for monetization, badges, moderator roles and higher limits (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account Standing tab: Discord's settings page, shipped in October 2023 with its Warning System, that lists an account's past violations and shows standing determined by active violations and their severity (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account status: whether an account can be used at all, which is about control rather than conduct: active, locked (a takeover or recovery in progress), deactivated (paused by the user) or closed; every penalty, including a permanent ban, is a penalty row instead (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Account versus role: the split that one account reads, posts, moderates, streams, books and hosts, so the platform records which role it acted in for each act instead of creating separate accounts per role (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Advertisers: brands and performance marketers buying attention next to user content, who need reach, targeting, measurement and suitability (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Advertising: ads in feeds, conversations, search and video sold by auction; the main business of content platforms (about $2.1 billion of Reddit's $2.2 billion revenue in 2025) (The User-Generated Platform Business).
API and data licensing: revenue from paid API tiers and multi-year content licenses sold to search and AI companies and developers (The User-Generated Platform Business).
ARPU (average revenue per user): revenue divided by users; it varies by region by more than thirty times, as Pinterest's $30.84 in the US and Canada against $0.83 in the rest of the world shows (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Badge: a visible mark on a profile; the rule is one visually distinct badge kind per meaning, each backed by a verification record, so revoking the verification closes the badge (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Bidirectional verification: the AT Protocol check that a handle resolves to a DID and that the DID document claims the handle; a handle failing either direction shows as handle.invalid (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Booking: a guest's reservation of a listing for a period, or a buyer's purchase; confirmed reservations of one listing can't overlap, which an exclusion constraint enforces in the database (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Build, buy or rent: the per-layer vendor decision; the default is to build the community, content and marketplace model and the ranking, and rent video, image delivery, identity verification, payments and insurance (The Platform Landscape).
Charge types: the connected-accounts decision a marketplace makes first, between destination charges, separate charges and transfers, and direct charges; it decides whose balance a refund or chargeback hits and whose name is on the card statement (The Platform Landscape).
Classifier: a model that finds new, unjudged content and returns a score that should order a human review queue, unlike a hash match, which finds copies of something already judged (The Platform Landscape).
Closure: the immediate part of account deletion: sign-in stops, the profile disappears, listings unpublish and the handle stops resolving, while erasure follows later as a job (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Commerce and affiliate: revenue from merchants through shoppable pins, product ads, catalog feeds and affiliate fees on attributed sales (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Community: a space with members, rules and moderators (a forum, a server, a channel or a group), and the unit of scope for membership, rules, moderation and much of the load (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Confusables: characters that look alike across scripts, such as Latin "a" and Cyrillic "а", mapped to one form before the handle uniqueness check so look-alike handles collide (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Connected accounts: a payments platform's product for paying many sub-merchants, which almost every marketplace runs on; Stripe Connect is the commonly documented example (The Platform Landscape).
Content item: anything published that others can see, reply to or report (a post, a comment, a media post, a stream or a listing), carrying an author, a place, a visibility and a moderation state (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Content revision: each version of an item's text as published, never edited; reports and evidence point to the revision they judged (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Creator revenue share: a share of ad revenue on a creator's content, passed through to the creator; YouTube pays 55% of net watch-page ad revenue and 45% of a pooled Shorts allocation (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Creators: people whose content draws the audience (posters, streamers, video makers, artists), who need reach, tools, a way to get paid and a fair hearing when moderated (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Data licensees: search engines and AI companies paying for access to the corpus, who need reliable API access under contract (The User-Generated Platform Business).
DAUq and WAUq (daily and weekly uniques): Reddit's audience measures: 121.4 million daily and 471.6 million weekly uniques in the fourth quarter of 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Delegated verifier: an organization, such as a newsroom verifying its journalists, that grants badges on the platform's behalf; each badge records which verifier granted it, so a verifier's grants can be reviewed and revoked in bulk (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Deletion request: a user's request recorded with its scope (close the account, remove what they published, or erase their personal data), each fulfilled on its own clock (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Destination charge: a charge type where the platform takes the payment and transfers the host's share, which Stripe recommends for marketplaces such as home rentals (The Platform Landscape).
DID (decentralized identifier): a permanent account identifier on the AT Protocol whose document lists the account's current host and keys; the handle is a human-readable name layered on it (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
did:plc: a DID method in which the user can hold rotation keys (on paper, if they like) and repoint the DID to a new host without the old host's help, which is how an account moves (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Direct charge: a charge type where the seller is the merchant and the platform takes an application fee, suited to software platforms more than marketplaces (The Platform Landscape).
Domain handle: a handle that is a domain name, proved by a DNS TXT record at _atproto.<handle> or an HTTPS response at /.well-known/atproto-did and re-checked on a schedule; Bluesky treats it as a form of verification, and over 309,000 Bluesky accounts used one by the end of 2025 (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Erasure job: the background job that walks each record type for a closed account, skips anything under a legal hold or retention window, erases or de-identifies the rest and reports what it removed and kept, re-running when a hold is released (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Federated network: a platform shape where posts live on independent servers that interoperate, read as timelines across servers (Mastodon and the fediverse, Bluesky on the AT Protocol), mostly funded by donations, hosting services and venture capital (The Platform Landscape).
GBV (gross booking value): the total value of bookings made on a rental marketplace; Airbnb reported $91.3 billion for 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
GIFCT hash-sharing database: hashes of terrorist and violent extremist content, labeled by entity, behavior and incident and shared among members with an information-sharing agreement (The Platform Landscape).
GMS (gross merchandise sales): Etsy's measure of the total value of goods sold on its marketplace: $10.46 billion in 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
GMV (gross merchandise value): the total value of goods sold on a goods marketplace; eBay reported $79.6 billion for 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Guests and buyers: the demand side of a marketplace, who need an accurate listing, an all-in price and a refund when it isn't as described (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Handle: a public, mentionable and impersonable name for an account; it's displayed as typed, normalized for uniqueness, and never used as the key other records point at (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Handle history: every handle an account has held, kept as time ranges so old names still redirect and resolve, with a released name held back from reuse for a period (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Handle key: the normalized form of a handle (case folded, confusables mapped) that carries the unique constraint, beside the handle as the user typed it (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Hosts and sellers: people and businesses that list inventory (a room, an RV, a car, a handmade item, a used jacket) and need bookings or sales, payouts on time and protection when something goes wrong (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Identify-then-challenge: Airbnb's sign-in flow in which the user says who they are first and a server-side policy engine picks the challenge most likely to succeed, with a "try another way" fallback; it reported 2.6% more successful authentications and 27% fewer duplicate accounts (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Identity verified: the verification meaning in which a government ID, a selfie or third-party data was checked, shown to counterparties in a transaction (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Legal hold: a record that suspends erasure of named records for a stated reason (a claim window, an open dispute, a CyberTipline preservation, a preservation request, litigation, regulatory retention or tax) until it's released; one from a law enforcement request that forbids notice is never shown to the user (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Life-cycle events: events such as content.published, content.removed, booking.confirmed and account.closed, emitted through the outbox for feeds, search, notifications, payouts and transparency counts to subscribe to (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Listing: the bookable or purchasable inventory side of a listing content item; whether it's visible is the content item's state, whether it can be booked is the listing's status (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Live streaming platform: a platform shape where users supply broadcasts and others consume live video, chat and clips, earning from advertising, subscriptions, tips and virtual currency (Twitch, YouTube Live, Kick) (The Platform Landscape).
Marketplace take rate: service fees charged to hosts, sellers, guests or buyers as a percentage of the booking or sale; Airbnb's revenue was about 13.4% of gross booking value in 2025 (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Media asset: an uploaded file with its own processing state, hashes, storage cost and retention, attached to content items; one file can sit in several posts and be kept or purged on a different schedule from them (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Media host: a platform shape where users supply images and video that others consume as galleries, embeds and feeds, earning from advertising and storage subscriptions (Imgur, Pinterest, YouTube, Vimeo) (The Platform Landscape).
Membership: an account's membership in a community over time, with each join, leave and rejoin a separate range, so whether someone was a member when they posted has an answer (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Moderation case: the playbook's case, report, decision and penalty tables, scoped to a community or the platform and pinned to the content revision that was judged (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Paid checkmark: a badge granted for a subscription rather than a check; the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, 2025, in its first DSA non-compliance decision, finding that X's paid blue checkmark deceived users (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Paid communities: monthly tiers members pay for access to a server, channel or subforum; Discord's Server Subscriptions launched with owners keeping 90% (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Peer-to-peer marketplace: a platform shape where users list stays, vehicles and goods that others book or buy, earning from take rate, seller ads, protection plans and float (Airbnb, Outdoorsy, RVshare, Turo, Etsy, eBay, Vinted) (The Platform Landscape).
Penalty evasion: a banned user returning on a new account, detected by linking accounts to one person (devices, payment instruments, identity documents, behavior) (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Platform shapes: the six kinds of user-generated platform by what users supply and others consume: communities, media hosts, live streaming, chat, federated networks and peer-to-peer marketplaces (The Platform Landscape).
Premium subscriptions: ad-free tiers, perks and badges that users pay for directly (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Profile: a public face of an account (a member, a creator, a host, a seller or a brand), at most one of each kind per account, with its own role-specific state (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Promoted listings and seller ads: paid placement inside a marketplace's own search, sold to sellers; eBay's $1,993 million of 2025 advertising revenue was "primarily" fees to promote listings (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Protection margins: revenue from protection plans priced per trip, host plans that trade take rate for deductible, and deposit waivers (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Protection plan: contractual protection a rental marketplace sells beside third-party insurance, such as Turo's host plans, which are contractual reimbursement and "not insurance" (The Platform Landscape).
Re-verification: checking identity again after a change of legal name or other account information, or on detected risk; Airbnb blocks new reservations, or the host's calendar, until it's done (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Regulators and law enforcement: the FTC, state attorneys general, the European Commission and national coordinators, Ofcom, eSafety, the ICO, NCMEC as the US reporting channel, police and courts, who need reports in their format, notices answered on their clock and records on demand (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Remote account: an account from another federated server that a server keeps rows for and moderates locally (limit, suspend) but can't delete at its home (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Reserved handle: a name held back from registration: brand and public-figure names, staff-like names such as "admin" or "support", names of banned accounts and recently released handles (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Role: a named set of community permissions with a rank, held through memberships; platform staff use separate grants, never community roles (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Role-scoped penalty: a penalty that names the role it restricts (host, guest, member, moderator and so on), so a host who cancels repeatedly loses instant book or visibility rather than the account; sitewide suspension is reserved for conduct that makes the person unsafe in every role (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Seller subscriptions: monthly plans with tools and credits sold to sellers, such as Etsy Plus at $10 a month (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Separate charges and transfers: a charge type where the platform charges first and decides later whom to pay, for multi-party or not-yet-assigned orders (The Platform Landscape).
Step-up: requiring a recent strong factor before actions where value or identity moves: changing the payout account, email, phone or handle, adding a co-host or moderator, transferring a community's ownership, or starting a stream with a new key (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Stream: a live broadcast's state (scheduled, live, ended or interrupted) and its recording, kept beside the stream's content item (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Strike: on YouTube, a violation after the first warning; each strike lasts 90 days, the first freezes posting for a week, the second for two weeks, and a third within 90 days can remove the channel (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Tipping and paid messages: one-time fan payments such as Super Chat, Super Thanks, Bits and tips; YouTube passes 70% of fan funding to the creator (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Trusted Verifier: an organization Bluesky authorizes to verify accounts, whose badges are scalloped and name the organization that granted them; 21 Trusted Verifiers had verified 777 accounts by the end of 2025 (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
User-generated platform: a platform where users supply what others consume (posts, media, streams or listings) and the platform makes those contributions findable, safe enough to use and worth paying for, while taking a cut, selling ads, or both (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Users: people who read, watch, buy, book and occasionally post, often logged out, who need something worth their time, safety and control over their data (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Vendors: video, CDN, identity, insurance, payments and trust and safety providers that integrate with the platform and receive its data under their terms (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Verification: a record of what was checked about an account, by whom (the platform, a vendor or a delegated organization), with what evidence and for what period; "verified" can mean identity checked, authentic and notable, controls a domain, or paid (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
Virtual goods and currencies: awards, boosts, cheers and gifts users buy with a platform currency; no platform in the survey breaks out the revenue (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Volunteer moderators: users who run communities (forum moderators, server owners, channel mods) and need tools, automation and a platform that backs their decisions (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Volunteer versus platform moderation: the split that on community platforms most removals are made by users, not staff; Reddit's report for the second half of 2025 attributes 52.7% of removals to moderators and 44.7% to admins (The User-Generated Platform Business).
Warning: on YouTube, what a first violation usually gets; it expires after 90 days if the creator completes a policy training, and later violations become strikes (Accounts, Identity & Standing).
WebFinger: the lookup that resolves a Mastodon user@domain handle: the server asks the domain's /.well-known/webfinger endpoint for the acct: URI, follows the self link to the ActivityPub actor, then looks up again from the actor's own username and host to confirm they match (Accounts, Identity & Standing).