An AOL Watch reader claiming insider knowledge
sends the following account of The Hub's last year...

The decision by AOL and New Line Cinema to close the Hub comes as no surprise to those of us familiar with it's inner workings.

Originally developed to be hip, smart, and topical, it desperately clung to life by going after anything that it thought might appeal to its targeted 18-34 year old male audience. In a word: sex. I was the supervisor of the Hub's main chat room for six months in 1997, before I finally grew tired of incompetent management and quit... (I was originally hired to help prevent the hosts from terrorizing the guests. The original idea that such AOL chat room customs as age-sex checks and emoticons should be discouraged had gotten turned on its head, with hosts berating guests the instant they entered the room.)

I had started as a host reluctantly, and I fit into my new role even more reluctantly. Just weeks before being named supervisor, I was threatened with the loss of my position over my use of "masked" vulgarity. One of my first duties was to remind the hosts of their training, which stated the Hub took a far more relaxed view of the Terms of Service than AOL in general...

Because the Hub didn't send the hosts for Community Leader training, the hosts were free to make up the rules as they went along. Guests were threatened with the loss of their accounts for such offenses as age-sex checks, using curse words like "crap" or "damn" (neither a TOSable offense), and refusing to believe that the hosts, who used whatever screen name they liked (as opposed to other AOL areas, which had special host prefixes showing their status) were in fact working for the Hub.

Unfortunately, there was little I could say to the hosts to get them to listen, since any direction from "management" was likely to be met with the same response: "when are we going to receive credit for our hosting hours?" In fact, for the first seven months of 1997, those hosts who did receive waivers of their $19.95 AOL bill in return for their minimum 24 hours a month of hosting almost surely didn't get one on a regular basis.

Some hosts, who were on a budget, actually lost their accounts over the situation. And in May, thanks to a maxed out credit card, I became one of them. When I called AOL to point out that I should have been waivered, I was told that they not only had no record of me being a waivered employee, but that I had not received one since December of 1996, the month AOL switched to unlimited access.

I was forced to open a new account on my checking account, and notify the hosts that their supervisor now had a new name, thanks to the Hub's inability to either provide the promised waivers or notify us that they weren't forthcoming. Even today, the Hub still owes me $80 for four months of hosting that were never credited, and countless other hosts are still owed as well.

After months of promises that the problems would be resolved, the Hub finally designated hosting as a purely volunteer activity, saying that any waivers that actually made it to the hosts accounts should be considered a bonus...

Meanwhile, the Hub managed to come up with actual salaries for their new "cyberjockeys." These were models who were sent out to flirt with male guests, leading them from chat room to chat room in an attempt to get the ratings that were so desperately needed. Along those lines, the Hub also initiated new areas, among the a music area; calendar girls (a sex and "relationships" area); Huge Electronic Brain (video games); a sports room, and a mystery and crime area. Most disappeared without a trace.

In August of 1997, I voluntarily resigned my position, fed up with internal politics, a management that considered their volunteer workers undeserving of either the truth or any respect, and with the whole notion of volunteering my time and effort to help AOL's stockholders make money. Hosting for AOL is like volunteering for an 8 hour shift at McDonalds and getting a Big Mac as payment...

The Hub, like much of AOL, had no concept of what they wanted to provide, and no concept of how to provide it if they had. It's not in the least surprising to see them go...