Thanks for your post.
As an ex-employee of United, I can say that I did not formally get reprimanded or warned by UA against posting, even though I'm clearly one of the more frequent posters.
Of course, few if any of my posts were very critical of UA, for good reason. Hence, I had also been criticized by some here for being a cheerleader.
Cheerleader or not, it is indeed difficult to post knowing there are many watching.
This is why I've always been a strong advocate of UA dedicating someone like StarwoodLurker or CO Insider to the forum to be the face of the airline, but alas, this idea, which I proposed several times to management leaders, was shot down for a variety of reasons which I will not go into. I still firmly believe that UA is missing the boat by using a great 21st century medium to have better relations with its customers. But I also realize that it is a tall promise to keep - and if there is to be an official presence, dedicated and frequent and non-BS updates are needed, and anything short of that would be doing more harm than good.