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I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies,

• riffic 4y ago
  verification has always been an arbitrary label, placed upon an account by someone inside Twitter (generally because they like you).
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    sort of. that also happens. check marks look tied to popularity, leading one to wonder why arbitrarily less popular accounts have check marks. "it couldn't be anything besides connections could it?" its natural to wonder that way. the reason exceptions to popularity resulted in blue checkmarks is because the popularity was only a correlation. the likelihood of your account being impersonated is a primary driver of verification. so impersonation is the cause, this is correlated to a desire to want to impersonate which is tied to popularity, but nobody needs to be popular to be impersonated. there is also a way to game that by... causing the impersonation yourself. I would say that its coincidence people place any desire and covet on verification. Without that, the 'controversy' disappears and it is replaced by utility and consumer protection.
• whateveracct 4y ago
  Blue check has like 0 moat.
• somenameforme 4y ago
  You care about what you have to say, and this phenomena at scale is why Twitter succeeds. The "important people" came after Twitter succeeded. And I'd argue that "their thoughts" amount to little more than a mixture self promotion, virtue signaling, and an occasional hot take. Twitter is likely more valuable to them than they are to Twitter, which is probably the driving factor behind the recent change. Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month. Seems like a reasonable and simple idea that can quickly chip into overhead costs while, itself, having near zero overhead. A million people being verified would be a quarter billion $ gross per year. And while a million may seem like a lot, it just circles back to where we began. They're monetizing narcissism, and that's a very safe bet.
  • deanCommie 4y ago
    > virtue signaling I despise this term. You don't know people's motivations. These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. And if you've had the luck/misfortune of becoming famous, should you not use the attention and reach you wield to focus on issues that you think are important in society? > Validation checkmarks will now cost $20/month. A) They're not for validation. They're to combat fraud and misinformation through impersonation. B) This is far from a done deal. All we know is Elon in his infinite wisdom is considering this, thinking - like you - that this is a pure ego play for people. He still may pull the trigger and destroy the very concept. Or the people at Twitter that he doesn't fire and don't quit change his mind. It's a terrible idea, and I - an Elon skeptic - believe he's smart enough to figure that out eventually.
    • GameOfFrowns 4y ago
      >These may be genuinely important issues that they are using their audience and reach to magnify and promote. This is still Twitter you're talking about. Blue checkmarks are overwhelmingly associated with 'woke' narcissists stoking the flames of the culture war
      • deanCommie 4y ago
• Markoff 4y ago
  • nwiswell 4y ago
    > if your handle has blue check and you are not banned from Twitter, it basically means you are promoting Twitter allowed leftist/progressive agenda and everything you write should be taken with big grain of salt https://mobile.twitter.com/GOPLeader https://mobile.twitter.com/GOPLeader https://mobile.twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell https://mobile.twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell Have we just left reality behind entirely, or what?
    • Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
      I don't think the guys from the Polish law and order party, with their blue checks, were promoting much in the way of a leftist or progressive agenda.
    • Markoff 4y ago
      false sense of opposition views and diverse opinions thanks to self censorship to avoid bans, they are allowed only because they tread lightly with their words. they claim to be different but in the end they are pretty much same, the left is now extreme left and right is now center/left
• onion2k 4y ago
  I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. Elon has proposed selling blue check marks for $240/year. That's a lot of money for a lowly academic and nothing to a rich kid who wants to shout about their chosen topic. If that happens your heuristic for quality is going to break down very quickly. This isn't a criticism of Elon's idea. Blue check marks has always been a verification that the account isn't an imposter. They've never been a mark of subject matter authority. As a business strategy selling them makes a lot of sense; even more so if people believe they're buying credibility.
  • elcomet 4y ago
    > They've never been a mark of subject matter authority. That's false, the owner has to be notable enough to get a blue check mark. Authenticity is just one of the requirements
    • DandyDev 4y ago
      That is true _at the moment_, but do you think that when Elon starts charging money for the check mark, he's going to leave money at the table for something as small as authenticity?
    • MikusR 4y ago
      > That's false, the owner has to be notable enough to get a blue check mark. Authenticity is just one of the requirements That's false, you just have to know/bribe someone who works there.
  • luke727 4y ago
    > Blue check marks has always been a verification that the account isn't an imposter. It might have started out that way, but over the years Twitter also added behavioral requirements primarily aimed at undesirables. Most prominent case I can recall is Richard Spencer.
• NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  > I don't believe that I have contributed anything super valuable to the world thus far. Neither have most of the blue checkmarks. Many of them cause more pain if anything.
• blacklight 4y ago
  We have solved this problem in a much better way on Mastodon. Do you want your account to be verified? Do you have a personal or business website or blog that is associated to you? Then just add an <a rel="me" href="my social account"> to the page, add the link to your profile, and the connection is done - you have proved that you are the owner of that website. Do we really need anything more than this?
  • noirscape 4y ago
    You can also use a <link> tag in the <head> fwiw. As long as it is marked with rel="me", it'll work. Probably more useful with how many sites these days are JavaScript blobs that don't really transmit over static HTML anymore.
  • Bud 4y ago
• ArcMex 4y ago
  >I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say Reaching 3 - 5 friends who care is enough for me.
• yur3i__ 4y ago
  > Personally I think Twitter would work best if it was left to be just that. I don't think anyone really cares about what I have to say, for example This hasn't been my experience of twitter at all, I follow far more unverified people than I do verified and I know I'm not the only one that does. Communities like football (soccer) twitter aren't built on a few large verified accounts but, as far as I can tell, by mass participation more akin to reddit.
• viraptor 4y ago
  > I think the "blue check" verification on Twitter is its most powerful asset. That seems like a business idea. A mastodon instance without public registration, requiring manual verification, making crossposts to other platforms built-in and trivial. Once established, charging the rich for verification/access, while inviting the known and worthy for free to keep the standards up.
• jemmyw 4y ago
  Well, I personally would rather read your thoughts than those of the "important" people you mentioned. You aren't trying to sell me something or gain attention, you probably have no agenda other than sharing what you think. If I reply you might actually read my reply, consider my words and write back.
  • mradek 4y ago
    Well gee I do appreciate that :) I like HN as an outlet for some interesting discussions that are relevant to me.
• jtode 4y ago
  >The most important people in the world (culture icons, heads of state & companies, and subject matter experts) congregate there to share their thoughts. So like TV, circa 1980. Funny how a lot of us are kinda pining for something like that to come back. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, by the way, but I am very amused, in a gallows kinda way, cause it seems to me that we have smashed that bottle real good. Someone wished for an M80 and blew the bottle up with it while the genie laughed. That whole idea of "important" people is looking pretty ragged right now. I can't think of anyone I trust to (a) know what's actually going on in any sort of expansive, globalized way, and (b) report that truth to me honestly, or even in a way that earnestly considers my real best interests. I have intellectual figures I trust to interpret the facts that come before them in a way I agree with and consider sound, some of whom do have public profile enough to disseminate those interpretations, but what facts are they interpreting, and are they actually facts?