The way Twitter verification used to work and why was of any value to other users was that, if your twitter name was, idk, the name of an important politician o

The way Twitter verification used to work and why was of any value to other users was that, if your twitter name was, idk, the name of an important politician or company, the blue checkmark meant that someone at twitter took some amount of care to check that you're actually that politician or company. Like, "verified" meant that twitter verfied their identity, tying the twitter account to some sort of external credentials. You used to know that you're talking to the actual company support team or whatever. Now it just means someone paid some amount of money. They're "verified" in the sense of like verifying the email address you used to sign up with to an olde timey web forum, and maybe that you're probably not an absolutely minimum effort spam/scam bot. However the "verified" checkmark is still basically useless because it doesn't verify an identity or credentials anymore, and it's easy enough for bad actors to get the checkmark to then impersonate some brand or website or whatever, and have their posts get privileged by The Algorithm. So, previously "verified" status was useful for people to be able to tell that the posts they're reading are really from who they think they're from. Now, "verified" status means that bad actors and bad posters get their posts boosted ahead of normal posts, so the replies to any mildly popular thread are going to be full of attempted scams and tepid takes. It's become completely useless for its original purpose and makes content discovery worse.