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Making the blue verified check exclusive is the main problem here. Twitter internal system/process of verifying accounts is fundamentally broken...why don’t th

by maram 7y ago

Making the blue verified check exclusive is the main problem here. Twitter internal system/process of verifying accounts is fundamentally broken...why don’t they open this to everyone and people can apply with their official ID?! They can add/create another Check mark for celebrities..but verified real accounts of people should be for everyone. Twitter is a public sphere and They should be able to identify real accounts easily. I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms..

capableweb 7y ago
I'm sure many of the conversations you've had on HN and elsewhere has been with people under pseudonyms. Just because they are using a pseudonym doesn't mean it's not a conversation not worth having. The value should be based on the actual conversation, not under what circumstance it's being held.
- tptacek 7y ago
  That's a detached, rational, coherent way of looking at things that has very little to do with how actual people "use" the blue checkmark, and how Twitter grooms its users to use it. The more complicated reality of how the checkmark works is that Twitter wants to have things both ways: the checkmarks promote accounts, and Twitter benefits from the increased engagement resulting from promoted accounts, and promoted accounts benefit from the exclusivity of the checkmark. But promoting accounts also puts Twitter on the hook, perceptually, for what some of those accounts say, so Twitter also has a fig leaf notion of the checkmark as simply a "verification system". But it's obviously not that.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    How so? Checkmark means "this account is owned by who you think owns it" to disambiguate celebrities from parodies and identity theives/trolls. The fact some people crave being famous enough to merit a checkmark is not a problem with checkmarks. People chase status of all kinds.
    - behindsight 7y ago
      Not that I disagree with your point, but Twitter has been known to "strip" the checkmark from controversial accounts. It's no longer for simply verifying authenticity.
      - tptacek 7y ago
        My impression is that it never was. Rather, the notion that the blue-check is an indicator of celebrity was cultivated by Twitter itself. It's just not something they can come out and say directly anymore.
      - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
        If you’re referring to Milo, it was stripped for violating the terms of the checkmark, not for being controversial. His profile claimed he was a Buzzfeed reporter IIRC. Although he was being satirical, he didn’t indicate such, and this causes problems because the whole point of the checkmark is to signal that this person is who they say they are (including any claims in their bio). Since the average random person doesn’t even know who Milo is, they may see his verified profile and attribute his inflammatory comments to Buzzfeed staff members. Twitter has many examples of taking enforcement actions for silly reasons, but this one actually made sense given that logic.
        cameronbrown 7y ago
        But that's still an issue. Twitter knew who Milo was, they'd verified his identity, and although he broke the rules, removing the checkmark told his followers one thing: "we now know anyone Twitter verifies is someone they agree with politically". This puts them on the hook for everybody who's verified. It should be a verification only. If they didn't like what he said then they should've removed the account.
        tptacek 7y ago
        You can "should" all you want, but it's not verification only. If it was, anyone could get verified. It's endorsement, and nobody wants to endorse Milo Yiannapoulos.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  >> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms > a pseudonym doesn't mean it's not a conversation not worth having You are arguing against a point of view that you made up by taking a statement out of context. That is wholly dishonest (and/or lazily indifferent to raising more noise). The discussion is about verified identity and what that means. Whether you think it is valuable to discuss the finer points of my family with someone (lets say... pretending to be my grandfather) via a twitter blue checkmark is irrelevant to the discussion.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  If you look at the leader board of HN, most of the top fifteen or so can be readily identified by their real name even if they aren't using it in their handle in some way. (I don't know about the rest of the board, having not looked in depth at every single name on it.) Most of the top fifteen-ish do seem to be using some portion of their real name in their handle. Real names aren't required here. You can call yourself whatever you want. In actual practice, the community does appear to care whether or not it knows who the hell you actually are. It does appear to correlate to some degree to ranking on the leader board.
  - ajxs 7y ago
    You're right that there is a correlation. However, it's important to note that the community is not selecting for identifiable users by not upvoting pseudonymous users. The individuals with the highest karma are typically ones who have earned distinction in their field and are advertising themselves as such. This somewhat identifies them as authorities on certain subjects and their expertise is respected. The system is neither incentivising identified users, not punishing anonymous users. It's just rewarding certain identified ones.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    > If you look at the leader board of HN There's a leader board?
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      The footer has a link titled Lists. The leader board is the top entry on that page.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    I think it goes the other way. People who write good content often like to use their real name because it builds their personal brand, and don't want to harm it with shitposts. Fewer people put the effort in anonymously for no benefit. The voting audience isn't craving names.
    - 7y ago
- Shivetya 7y ago
  well if you are like me I joined not knowing the convention in use here so just kept an alias I am familiar with. people tend to rebel from true name account rules, some of this is exactly because of twitter has become which is a tool of bullies to intimidate those they dislike or disagree with.
- riffic 7y ago
  That works fine (somewhat) when you have moderation, and breaks down at a certain scale.
- maram 7y ago
  Of course, I have many intellectual convo with people under pseudonyms. But HN isn’t Twitter. And just because HN has many intellectual users who write under pseudonyms it doesn’t mean the same thing will happen in twitter! Twitter is: 1. Used by the mainstream almost globally (HN is used by the fringe) 2. Real-time global messages in all languages 3. Used by the president I can go on but to because of these reasons the value of tweet cannot be based on the actual conversation. HN iS different because of the hard work of YC partners and the caliber of HN community. HN would have been occupied by thugs long time ago to do astroturfing on behalf of big companies. Here is an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383746
ar_lan 7y ago
I've never understood the goal of it. It feels like they claim it's to help those in the public eye that might frequently be targets of harassment or fraudulent copy-cat accounts, but AFAICT it's just a way to declare someone "popular" (or just blatantly handed out to people who have friends at Twitter). It's just another way to separate people arbitrarily for no real reason.
- daeken 7y ago
  FWIW, when I got my blue checkmark I had something like 6k followers; not exactly a popular account. I did it because there were some copycat accounts and I was dealing with some nasty harassment. The process was painless and it helped a whole hell of a lot in the end.
- simion314 7y ago
  There are many scammers/malicious/deceitful people that made accounts for celebrities and attempted to scam(or other bad crap) people. So there is a group of people at risk of getting impersonated and a solution is needed for this but it seems Twitter does not have it.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    That's the blue checkmark
    - simion314 7y ago
      Yes the checkmark should be the solution in theory but it seems from this article that it is not implemented correctly.
freepor 7y ago
Would all men named William Gates get to be a verified Bill Gates? There must be hundreds or more.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
notatoad 7y ago
I don't know why Twitter doesn't just outsource the verification - make a little "DNC" or "GOP" badge instead of the blue check, and let the parties verify who their candidates are. Same thing for various professional organizations, sports leagues or any other group that has a lot of people needing to be verified. They could probably even make money off it.
- danso 7y ago
  They already kind of do this. Some media people are verified when someone at their company sends over a list of current employees and corresponding Twitter handles.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  The USA is a free county. Party membership is not required to run for office.
paulddraper 7y ago
The blue checkmark is weird. When it first came out, it was like a pseudo endorsement, then it was a prestige thing. It doesn't seem to really do anything except stoke elitism.
- fortran77 7y ago
  It should simply mean "this name and bio has been verified" (so that other people whose name happens to be "Donald Trump" for example can't have a bio that say's their the President). Twitter started using it for endorsements -- and taking the blue check away from controversial people with unpopular views. That makes little sense to me.
patrickdavey 7y ago
Excellent idea. Might also help against the bot issues. If we could just turn off the visibility of non-verified accounts (or better still, make that the default) it seems misinformation would be a bit harder to spread.
- Avamander 7y ago
  But will also kill anyone's account who doesn't want to get harassed and/or lose their privacy.
  - patrickdavey 7y ago
    I admit I've only just now looked at what it means to be verified: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit... doesn't seem like you'd necessarily have to give a real name or anything. Sure it'd mean Twitter would know more about you I guess? For me, at the moment, I'm genuinely concerned about the rise of bots and their impact on online discourse. I'd love to see measures put in place to flag or prevent their use. You only have to look at some of the comments on a Trump/thunberg/Sanders post. Or integrating https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/ https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/ Intro Twitters service or building their own _and turning it on my default_ Certainly doesn't have to be the verified account direction, but, something needs to be done.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      Well, if everyone could get verified, what's to stop real people spreading disinformation but now, with a checkmark? I'm all for identity verification and having a strong online identity (e.g. I really like Keybase and Estonian PKI), but being identified shouldn't mean one can be trusted.
Nextgrid 7y ago
> They can add/create another Check mark for celebrities In this case the "normal" checkmark will lose any meaning and the new "celebrity" checkmark will be what people are after and it will be gamed just the same way as the current checkmark is.
- djrogers 7y ago
  > In this case the "normal" checkmark will lose any meaning No, it would mean 'this is a real person, and this is their real name', which is something that is currently impossoble to determine for 99% of twitter accounts today. Wether or not people want to game the 'celebrity' mark is irrelevant to that.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    What would be the criteria for a "real person" checkmark then? There's still no universal, government-provided API that would allow you to check whether an ID is real, so bad actors can just cheat the system by providing fake IDs. And even if the ID problem is somehow solved, it wouldn't prevent bad actors from just paying people to create accounts under their own IDs and post their propaganda. The current blue checkmark is being sought after because of its exclusivity, if this disappears then the attention-seekers will cling onto something different to make themselves look special and supposedly better than you. Also, the reason the current checkmark is both exclusive and yet this fake politician was able to get one is because Twitter wants to maintain good relationships with powerful and/or popular people, and the exclusive checkmark is kind of a welcome gift. Removing the exclusivity would totally nullify its utility as a gift, which is why they keep the whole verification system in place despite being completely broken (as this incident proves yet again) and spew some BS about working on improving it just to buy themselves time.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      This is total lunacy. It has nothing to do with exclusivity and everything to do with verification. There are established KYC processes followed by every serious company, like a bank. Yes, there is no straightforward api, but that is irrelevant. Banning real people would actually have an effect, as you could only sell your ID once.that would massively drive up the cost of using fake account to post propaganda. People can sell out in real life for real, you can bribe real voters too ( and sometimes even officials!)
ajxs 7y ago
I believe very strongly in individual privacy online. The idea that I should have to identify myself online, even just to the platform, by my legal name in order to engage in discourse is entirely abhorrent. I care very much about limiting the amount of information that corporations like Twitter have about me. Without going on a tangent, I don't trust these organisations to use this kind of data responsibly and I don't trust that the world may not change in a way that will penalise people in the real world for engaging in honest debate online today. It's not hard to find examples of people who have been 'doxed' and suffered real world consequences.
- sushisource 7y ago
  Nothing OP said implied all accounts should become verified. Simply that it should be an option for everyone.
  - trophycase 7y ago
    Making verified an option for everyone is one step away from making it mandatory for everyone.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      Making abortion an option for everyone's one step away from making it mandatory for everyone. Nope, doesnt make any sense.
  - ajxs 7y ago
    I'm responding to: > I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms..
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
harikb 7y ago
AFAIK Twitter used to have it / released this feature. May be it is was via invitation. I remember applying for it. I think they got inundated with requests and pulled the plug
rellui 7y ago
There are services that exists that checks if a person is real or not (requiring Id, passports, real facial captures, etc). Surprised that twitter didn't even do the most basic checks.
eitland 7y ago
> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms.. I've been thinking about this a lot after newspapers started demanding full names. What I think I see is that full name policies correlate with more toxicity. This might sound counterintuitive at first but there is a really simple explanation: - Smart people are careful. - Less smart people care less. - The same goes for people who have extremely strong opinions. - Finally a lot of trolls can live just fine with a made up name that resembles a real one. Full name policies optimize for trolls, dumb people and people who have very strong opinions. If real name policies was a good idea, Facebook and the comments in online newspapers should be nice and HN, lobste.rs and Ars Technica should be really ugly and dumb. The opposite would actually be more true.
rhizome 7y ago
>why don’t they open this to everyone and people can apply with their official ID?! Probably has something to do with there being no apparent rhyme nor reason behind their verification process nor criteria. This says to me that they simply don't know what they're doing (with it) and that "knowing someone" will continue to be the main driver for acceptance in the program. And people look down at cowboy coding...
- girvo 7y ago
  What would this be called... cowboy business decisions isn’t snappy enough as a term, and I’ve seen this often enough that it would be good to have a term for it!
  - warent 7y ago
    I think the word is Cronyism
kevingadd 7y ago
They opened it to everyone for a while and then were doing such a bad job of it that they closed it up again to stop the complaints and suggested in public that they were discontinuing verification. (Of course, that wasn't true) You can see here https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit... that they used to accept requests but it is now "on hold"
sergiotapia 7y ago
Because the blue checkmark is a political tool wielded by twitter. This much is obvious.
jackcosgrove 7y ago
> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms Is your name Maram? Is there some way I can find your name?
gowld 7y ago
And yet you post on HN, Twitter, and Medium without your last name.
Wheaties466 7y ago
Correct. If they did this it would largely tank the new social newwork in beta called the voice(https://voice.com/ https://voice.com/). Since that seems to be the main premise behind that.
pelliphant 7y ago
what is the definition of a public sphere? To me twitter is just another service from a private corporation that I can choose to use or not. Is it "public sphere" because they make everything searchable and readable from the public internet? What makes an account real on this platform? do you mean that the text is written by a human and not a bot?

by maram 7y ago

capableweb 7y ago

I'm sure many of the conversations you've had on HN and elsewhere has been with people under pseudonyms. Just because they are using a pseudonym doesn't mean it's not a conversation not worth having. The value should be based on the actual conversation, not under what circumstance it's being held.

tptacek 7y ago
That's a detached, rational, coherent way of looking at things that has very little to do with how actual people "use" the blue checkmark, and how Twitter grooms its users to use it. The more complicated reality of how the checkmark works is that Twitter wants to have things both ways: the checkmarks promote accounts, and Twitter benefits from the increased engagement resulting from promoted accounts, and promoted accounts benefit from the exclusivity of the checkmark. But promoting accounts also puts Twitter on the hook, perceptually, for what some of those accounts say, so Twitter also has a fig leaf notion of the checkmark as simply a "verification system". But it's obviously not that.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  How so? Checkmark means "this account is owned by who you think owns it" to disambiguate celebrities from parodies and identity theives/trolls. The fact some people crave being famous enough to merit a checkmark is not a problem with checkmarks. People chase status of all kinds.
  - behindsight 7y ago
    Not that I disagree with your point, but Twitter has been known to "strip" the checkmark from controversial accounts. It's no longer for simply verifying authenticity.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      My impression is that it never was. Rather, the notion that the blue-check is an indicator of celebrity was cultivated by Twitter itself. It's just not something they can come out and say directly anymore.
    - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
      If you’re referring to Milo, it was stripped for violating the terms of the checkmark, not for being controversial. His profile claimed he was a Buzzfeed reporter IIRC. Although he was being satirical, he didn’t indicate such, and this causes problems because the whole point of the checkmark is to signal that this person is who they say they are (including any claims in their bio). Since the average random person doesn’t even know who Milo is, they may see his verified profile and attribute his inflammatory comments to Buzzfeed staff members. Twitter has many examples of taking enforcement actions for silly reasons, but this one actually made sense given that logic.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        But that's still an issue. Twitter knew who Milo was, they'd verified his identity, and although he broke the rules, removing the checkmark told his followers one thing: "we now know anyone Twitter verifies is someone they agree with politically". This puts them on the hook for everybody who's verified. It should be a verification only. If they didn't like what he said then they should've removed the account.
        tptacek 7y ago
        You can "should" all you want, but it's not verification only. If it was, anyone could get verified. It's endorsement, and nobody wants to endorse Milo Yiannapoulos.
Supermancho 7y ago
>> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms > a pseudonym doesn't mean it's not a conversation not worth having You are arguing against a point of view that you made up by taking a statement out of context. That is wholly dishonest (and/or lazily indifferent to raising more noise). The discussion is about verified identity and what that means. Whether you think it is valuable to discuss the finer points of my family with someone (lets say... pretending to be my grandfather) via a twitter blue checkmark is irrelevant to the discussion.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
If you look at the leader board of HN, most of the top fifteen or so can be readily identified by their real name even if they aren't using it in their handle in some way. (I don't know about the rest of the board, having not looked in depth at every single name on it.) Most of the top fifteen-ish do seem to be using some portion of their real name in their handle. Real names aren't required here. You can call yourself whatever you want. In actual practice, the community does appear to care whether or not it knows who the hell you actually are. It does appear to correlate to some degree to ranking on the leader board.
- ajxs 7y ago
  You're right that there is a correlation. However, it's important to note that the community is not selecting for identifiable users by not upvoting pseudonymous users. The individuals with the highest karma are typically ones who have earned distinction in their field and are advertising themselves as such. This somewhat identifies them as authorities on certain subjects and their expertise is respected. The system is neither incentivising identified users, not punishing anonymous users. It's just rewarding certain identified ones.
- wwweston 7y ago
  > If you look at the leader board of HN There's a leader board?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    The footer has a link titled Lists. The leader board is the top entry on that page.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  I think it goes the other way. People who write good content often like to use their real name because it builds their personal brand, and don't want to harm it with shitposts. Fewer people put the effort in anonymously for no benefit. The voting audience isn't craving names.
  - 7y ago
Shivetya 7y ago
well if you are like me I joined not knowing the convention in use here so just kept an alias I am familiar with. people tend to rebel from true name account rules, some of this is exactly because of twitter has become which is a tool of bullies to intimidate those they dislike or disagree with.
riffic 7y ago
That works fine (somewhat) when you have moderation, and breaks down at a certain scale.
maram 7y ago
Of course, I have many intellectual convo with people under pseudonyms. But HN isn’t Twitter. And just because HN has many intellectual users who write under pseudonyms it doesn’t mean the same thing will happen in twitter! Twitter is: 1. Used by the mainstream almost globally (HN is used by the fringe) 2. Real-time global messages in all languages 3. Used by the president I can go on but to because of these reasons the value of tweet cannot be based on the actual conversation. HN iS different because of the hard work of YC partners and the caliber of HN community. HN would have been occupied by thugs long time ago to do astroturfing on behalf of big companies. Here is an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383746

ar_lan 7y ago

I've never understood the goal of it. It feels like they claim it's to help those in the public eye that might frequently be targets of harassment or fraudulent copy-cat accounts, but AFAICT it's just a way to declare someone "popular" (or just blatantly handed out to people who have friends at Twitter). It's just another way to separate people arbitrarily for no real reason.

daeken 7y ago
FWIW, when I got my blue checkmark I had something like 6k followers; not exactly a popular account. I did it because there were some copycat accounts and I was dealing with some nasty harassment. The process was painless and it helped a whole hell of a lot in the end.
simion314 7y ago
There are many scammers/malicious/deceitful people that made accounts for celebrities and attempted to scam(or other bad crap) people. So there is a group of people at risk of getting impersonated and a solution is needed for this but it seems Twitter does not have it.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  That's the blue checkmark
  - simion314 7y ago
    Yes the checkmark should be the solution in theory but it seems from this article that it is not implemented correctly.

freepor 7y ago

Would all men named William Gates get to be a verified Bill Gates? There must be hundreds or more.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

notatoad 7y ago

I don't know why Twitter doesn't just outsource the verification - make a little "DNC" or "GOP" badge instead of the blue check, and let the parties verify who their candidates are. Same thing for various professional organizations, sports leagues or any other group that has a lot of people needing to be verified. They could probably even make money off it.

danso 7y ago
They already kind of do this. Some media people are verified when someone at their company sends over a list of current employees and corresponding Twitter handles.
lonelappde 7y ago
The USA is a free county. Party membership is not required to run for office.

paulddraper 7y ago

The blue checkmark is weird. When it first came out, it was like a pseudo endorsement, then it was a prestige thing. It doesn't seem to really do anything except stoke elitism.

fortran77 7y ago
It should simply mean "this name and bio has been verified" (so that other people whose name happens to be "Donald Trump" for example can't have a bio that say's their the President). Twitter started using it for endorsements -- and taking the blue check away from controversial people with unpopular views. That makes little sense to me.

patrickdavey 7y ago

Excellent idea. Might also help against the bot issues. If we could just turn off the visibility of non-verified accounts (or better still, make that the default) it seems misinformation would be a bit harder to spread.

Avamander 7y ago
But will also kill anyone's account who doesn't want to get harassed and/or lose their privacy.
- patrickdavey 7y ago
  I admit I've only just now looked at what it means to be verified: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit... doesn't seem like you'd necessarily have to give a real name or anything. Sure it'd mean Twitter would know more about you I guess? For me, at the moment, I'm genuinely concerned about the rise of bots and their impact on online discourse. I'd love to see measures put in place to flag or prevent their use. You only have to look at some of the comments on a Trump/thunberg/Sanders post. Or integrating https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/ https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/ Intro Twitters service or building their own _and turning it on my default_ Certainly doesn't have to be the verified account direction, but, something needs to be done.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Well, if everyone could get verified, what's to stop real people spreading disinformation but now, with a checkmark? I'm all for identity verification and having a strong online identity (e.g. I really like Keybase and Estonian PKI), but being identified shouldn't mean one can be trusted.

Nextgrid 7y ago

> They can add/create another Check mark for celebrities In this case the "normal" checkmark will lose any meaning and the new "celebrity" checkmark will be what people are after and it will be gamed just the same way as the current checkmark is.

djrogers 7y ago
> In this case the "normal" checkmark will lose any meaning No, it would mean 'this is a real person, and this is their real name', which is something that is currently impossoble to determine for 99% of twitter accounts today. Wether or not people want to game the 'celebrity' mark is irrelevant to that.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  What would be the criteria for a "real person" checkmark then? There's still no universal, government-provided API that would allow you to check whether an ID is real, so bad actors can just cheat the system by providing fake IDs. And even if the ID problem is somehow solved, it wouldn't prevent bad actors from just paying people to create accounts under their own IDs and post their propaganda. The current blue checkmark is being sought after because of its exclusivity, if this disappears then the attention-seekers will cling onto something different to make themselves look special and supposedly better than you. Also, the reason the current checkmark is both exclusive and yet this fake politician was able to get one is because Twitter wants to maintain good relationships with powerful and/or popular people, and the exclusive checkmark is kind of a welcome gift. Removing the exclusivity would totally nullify its utility as a gift, which is why they keep the whole verification system in place despite being completely broken (as this incident proves yet again) and spew some BS about working on improving it just to buy themselves time.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    This is total lunacy. It has nothing to do with exclusivity and everything to do with verification. There are established KYC processes followed by every serious company, like a bank. Yes, there is no straightforward api, but that is irrelevant. Banning real people would actually have an effect, as you could only sell your ID once.that would massively drive up the cost of using fake account to post propaganda. People can sell out in real life for real, you can bribe real voters too ( and sometimes even officials!)

ajxs 7y ago

I believe very strongly in individual privacy online. The idea that I should have to identify myself online, even just to the platform, by my legal name in order to engage in discourse is entirely abhorrent. I care very much about limiting the amount of information that corporations like Twitter have about me. Without going on a tangent, I don't trust these organisations to use this kind of data responsibly and I don't trust that the world may not change in a way that will penalise people in the real world for engaging in honest debate online today. It's not hard to find examples of people who have been 'doxed' and suffered real world consequences.

sushisource 7y ago
Nothing OP said implied all accounts should become verified. Simply that it should be an option for everyone.
- trophycase 7y ago
  Making verified an option for everyone is one step away from making it mandatory for everyone.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Making abortion an option for everyone's one step away from making it mandatory for everyone. Nope, doesnt make any sense.
- ajxs 7y ago
  I'm responding to: > I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms..
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

harikb 7y ago

AFAIK Twitter used to have it / released this feature. May be it is was via invitation. I remember applying for it. I think they got inundated with requests and pulled the plug

rellui 7y ago

There are services that exists that checks if a person is real or not (requiring Id, passports, real facial captures, etc). Surprised that twitter didn't even do the most basic checks.

eitland 7y ago

> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms.. I've been thinking about this a lot after newspapers started demanding full names. What I think I see is that full name policies correlate with more toxicity. This might sound counterintuitive at first but there is a really simple explanation: - Smart people are careful. - Less smart people care less. - The same goes for people who have extremely strong opinions. - Finally a lot of trolls can live just fine with a made up name that resembles a real one. Full name policies optimize for trolls, dumb people and people who have very strong opinions. If real name policies was a good idea, Facebook and the comments in online newspapers should be nice and HN, lobste.rs and Ars Technica should be really ugly and dumb. The opposite would actually be more true.

rhizome 7y ago

>why don’t they open this to everyone and people can apply with their official ID?! Probably has something to do with there being no apparent rhyme nor reason behind their verification process nor criteria. This says to me that they simply don't know what they're doing (with it) and that "knowing someone" will continue to be the main driver for acceptance in the program. And people look down at cowboy coding...

girvo 7y ago
What would this be called... cowboy business decisions isn’t snappy enough as a term, and I’ve seen this often enough that it would be good to have a term for it!
- warent 7y ago
  I think the word is Cronyism

kevingadd 7y ago

They opened it to everyone for a while and then were doing such a bad job of it that they closed it up again to stop the complaints and suggested in public that they were discontinuing verification. (Of course, that wasn't true) You can see here https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit... that they used to accept requests but it is now "on hold"

sergiotapia 7y ago

Because the blue checkmark is a political tool wielded by twitter. This much is obvious.

jackcosgrove 7y ago

> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms Is your name Maram? Is there some way I can find your name?

gowld 7y ago

And yet you post on HN, Twitter, and Medium without your last name.

Wheaties466 7y ago

Correct. If they did this it would largely tank the new social newwork in beta called the voice(https://voice.com/ https://voice.com/). Since that seems to be the main premise behind that.

pelliphant 7y ago

what is the definition of a public sphere? To me twitter is just another service from a private corporation that I can choose to use or not. Is it "public sphere" because they make everything searchable and readable from the public internet? What makes an account real on this platform? do you mean that the text is written by a human and not a bot?