4 ms·
> The whole screwup stems from the bizarre misconception that the blue checkmark was some mark of prestige, rather than just "this person has a public-facing jo
by paulgb 4y ago
> The whole screwup stems from the bizarre misconception that the blue checkmark was some mark of prestige, rather than just "this person has a public-facing job and we've verified their identity".
The misconception was coming from inside the building. Ostensibly the blue check was a security feature, but it was also used as a positive signal when ranking content. Blue users could also see a separate notification feed of only other Blue users. And so on.
- raydev 4y ago> it was also used as a positive signal when ranking content This is (in my opinion) why they slowed down verifications to a crawl, because they realized it shouldn't necessarily lead to boosted importance, and that it certainly wouldn't scale if they opened up identity verification to everyone instead of just "famous people". So like every other half-baked feature that remained only partially rolled out for years, or features that were briefly available and then were hidden altogether, they just sat on it in fear of making any changes at all.