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Twitter owes most of its success to the Verified Checkmark, and the sorts of people who crave any kind of Officially Verified status that they can lord over the

Twitter owes most of its success to the Verified Checkmark, and the sorts of people who crave any kind of Officially Verified status that they can lord over the plebs who don't have such access—it was crack cocaine for self-important, narcissistic journalists and media personalities. once anyone could purchase a Verified Checkmark, once the doors to the Secret Cool Kid Clubhouse were thrown wide open, about half of the appeal of the platform (for them) disappeared overnight.

simonw 3y ago
That is such a cynical take. For me, the value of the verified checkmark was that it verified people and organizations were who they said they were. This was a big part of what made Twitter such a unique and fascinating place. You could learn a huge amount about the world from tweets that were attached to verified identities. Plus it was really fun. This tweet by Monica Lewinsky really wouldn't have landed without that verified mark! https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/1150348061442551808 https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/115034806144255180... Unfortunately, Musk apparently had the same cynical opinion of this that you have, and threw the entire thing away. No wonder Twitter has less cultural impact today than it did a year ago.
- goldenchrome 3y ago
  X has a ton of cultural impact today—it’s just that the audience has shifted from neoliberal to classical liberal/libertarian. Lots of politics, philosophy, tech news, and culture thrives. It’s just not happening in your bubble evidently.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    What on earth do you think ‘neoliberal’ means? Are you claiming there has been a mass exodus of Thatcherite/Reaganomic thinkers supportive of the Chicago School of market led small state capitalism from the platform? I guess I don’t see many Pinochet apologists on Twitter these days. I suggest a quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
    - bitwize 3y ago
      Neoliberal is a general purpose snarl word meaning, roughly, "stealth reactionary". Drew DeVault, for example, describes Hackernews as neoliberal because it does not do enough to muzzle Nazis and signal-boost progressives.
      - jameshart 3y ago
        That sounds like the exact opposite of what the original poster intended. And I’m pretty sure when either Drew DeVault or the OP is picturing a neoliberal neither is thinking of Margaret Thatcher. I guess words don’t have to mean things any more.
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    [flagged]
- adamrezich 3y ago
  there were plenty of famous/noteworthy people who Twitter refused to verify, and plenty of completely non-noteworthy people who they did verify. I'm not sure why you're pretending that any famous/noteworthy person could be and was verified, because this was never, ever the case. when Musk implemented cheap paid verification subscriptions, the first thing most of the formerly-exclusively-verified journalist-type users (that I follow, at least) did was post links to their profiles on new Twitter-clone platforms they were moving to, which, if investigated, revealed that they once again had a special "Verified" or "Verified Journalist" tag on their profiles there as well. surely you're not implying that my analysis has zero merit and that nobody who was verified on Twitter before paid verification subscriptions were implemented was ever in it for the self-important narcissism?
  - simonw 3y ago
    I interpreted your original comment as suggesting that most/all of the people who cared about verification were self-important narcissists. If someone got verified for narcissistic reasons it didn't particularly affect me: there were plenty of verified accounts that I paid no attention to at all. I cared about the verified accounts where the verified user or organization was noteworthy and interesting to me.
  - slantedview 3y ago
    Turns out that democratizing blue checkmarks solved one problem, but created another, in that it became much harder to vet reliable information on twitter, and intentionally misleading tweets would be boosted above those from professional journalists. The gaza war has been a flood of misinformation and spam. Community notes seems to be mostly good, but is utterly incapable of keeping up with the flood of misinformation. And so, overall, taking away blue checkmarks from professionals and giving them to spammers has been a net loss for Twitter, at least for those of us who appreciate good information.
    - favorited 3y ago
      Nothing was "democratized," it was commodified.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nerdbert 3y ago
Twitter owed much of its success to drawing a large number of people who had become famous for doing well in their fields, and as a reader I could trust that they were actually those people because of the blue checkmark. Once that went away, those people started to leave, and Twitter descended into a morass of nonsense, as they were replaced by people who never did anything notable in their lives but were jealous of the attention given to those who had.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  > and as a reader I could trust that they were actually those people because of the blue checkmark. why was this? what authoritative power over verifiable notability did Twitter once have, such that this could possibly be the case for anyone who thinks about it for longer than two seconds, or encounters their first instance of, "ok but why was this person verified while this other person isn't?" Malik Obama was verified on Twitter long, long before Musk took it over, and he regularly made (and still makes) all sorts of outlandish claims about his half-brother—are these all to be considered implicitly true, on account of his profile having been Pre-Musk Verified?
  - slantedview 3y ago
    The argument you make is that @SeymourHersh is no more authoritative a source of news and information than @FreedomLover837474, so why can't they both have blue checks. While true in theory, in practice, it turns out professional journalists are more reliable, which has led to people going elsewhere. Even if Twitter got it wrong with blue checks sometimes, by and large, the old approach led to a platform that was a vastly more reliable source of information than the cesspool we have today.
  - jsnell 3y ago
    You're misunderstanding the GP. It isn't that Twitter verifying someone was notable had value. It is that they already knew that person X was notable, and Twitter verified it was indeed that person rather than an imposter.
    - 3y ago
habinero 3y ago
I do not understand the mindset that leads someone to be envious of checkmarks, of all things. Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable. It just signaled that person is who they said they were. There's this swath of people who want to be Notable and just aren't, and they think that painting a checkmark on themselves will fix it.
- kbelder 3y ago
  >I do not understand the mindset that leads someone to be envious of checkmarks I completely agree with you. >Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable. I completely disagree with you.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Originally blue check verification was heavily throttled and restricted only to people who were being impersonated. So it was a mark that you were worth impersonating, being somewhat correlated with being notable, hence why it became valuable to people.
chasd00 3y ago
I’m not sure why the parent is downvoted so badly. The blue checkmark was the hottest status symbol online for a long time. Now that anyone can pay, get verified, and have one the former online elite have to rub shoulders with the plebs and they don’t like it.
toofy 3y ago
> …it was crack cocaine for narcissistic journalists and media personalities… i think the mess of blue checks now shows that this issue absolutely isn’t limited to “journalists and media personalities” social media as a whole has shown us first hand the lengths people will go to in order to seek impressions. it’s pretty common to see regular people lie, manipulate, twist, etc… to get those impressions. in the past, We devised something called journalistic ethics which he expected those with a platform to put a good faith effort to follow those guidelines. this allowed us to make a distinction between signal and noise. of course this wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is. either way, we’ve seen pretty clearly now for quite a while that it isn’t some nefarious plot by former “narcissistic” journalists or whatever—people on every site do this, and people actually pay money for the checks on twitter now lol.

simonw 3y ago

That is such a cynical take. For me, the value of the verified checkmark was that it verified people and organizations were who they said they were. This was a big part of what made Twitter such a unique and fascinating place. You could learn a huge amount about the world from tweets that were attached to verified identities. Plus it was really fun. This tweet by Monica Lewinsky really wouldn't have landed without that verified mark! https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/1150348061442551808 https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/115034806144255180... Unfortunately, Musk apparently had the same cynical opinion of this that you have, and threw the entire thing away. No wonder Twitter has less cultural impact today than it did a year ago.

goldenchrome 3y ago
X has a ton of cultural impact today—it’s just that the audience has shifted from neoliberal to classical liberal/libertarian. Lots of politics, philosophy, tech news, and culture thrives. It’s just not happening in your bubble evidently.
- jameshart 3y ago
  What on earth do you think ‘neoliberal’ means? Are you claiming there has been a mass exodus of Thatcherite/Reaganomic thinkers supportive of the Chicago School of market led small state capitalism from the platform? I guess I don’t see many Pinochet apologists on Twitter these days. I suggest a quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Neoliberal is a general purpose snarl word meaning, roughly, "stealth reactionary". Drew DeVault, for example, describes Hackernews as neoliberal because it does not do enough to muzzle Nazis and signal-boost progressives.
    - jameshart 3y ago
      That sounds like the exact opposite of what the original poster intended. And I’m pretty sure when either Drew DeVault or the OP is picturing a neoliberal neither is thinking of Margaret Thatcher. I guess words don’t have to mean things any more.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  [flagged]
adamrezich 3y ago
there were plenty of famous/noteworthy people who Twitter refused to verify, and plenty of completely non-noteworthy people who they did verify. I'm not sure why you're pretending that any famous/noteworthy person could be and was verified, because this was never, ever the case. when Musk implemented cheap paid verification subscriptions, the first thing most of the formerly-exclusively-verified journalist-type users (that I follow, at least) did was post links to their profiles on new Twitter-clone platforms they were moving to, which, if investigated, revealed that they once again had a special "Verified" or "Verified Journalist" tag on their profiles there as well. surely you're not implying that my analysis has zero merit and that nobody who was verified on Twitter before paid verification subscriptions were implemented was ever in it for the self-important narcissism?
- simonw 3y ago
  I interpreted your original comment as suggesting that most/all of the people who cared about verification were self-important narcissists. If someone got verified for narcissistic reasons it didn't particularly affect me: there were plenty of verified accounts that I paid no attention to at all. I cared about the verified accounts where the verified user or organization was noteworthy and interesting to me.
- slantedview 3y ago
  Turns out that democratizing blue checkmarks solved one problem, but created another, in that it became much harder to vet reliable information on twitter, and intentionally misleading tweets would be boosted above those from professional journalists. The gaza war has been a flood of misinformation and spam. Community notes seems to be mostly good, but is utterly incapable of keeping up with the flood of misinformation. And so, overall, taking away blue checkmarks from professionals and giving them to spammers has been a net loss for Twitter, at least for those of us who appreciate good information.
  - favorited 3y ago
    Nothing was "democratized," it was commodified.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nerdbert 3y ago

Twitter owed much of its success to drawing a large number of people who had become famous for doing well in their fields, and as a reader I could trust that they were actually those people because of the blue checkmark. Once that went away, those people started to leave, and Twitter descended into a morass of nonsense, as they were replaced by people who never did anything notable in their lives but were jealous of the attention given to those who had.

adamrezich 3y ago
> and as a reader I could trust that they were actually those people because of the blue checkmark. why was this? what authoritative power over verifiable notability did Twitter once have, such that this could possibly be the case for anyone who thinks about it for longer than two seconds, or encounters their first instance of, "ok but why was this person verified while this other person isn't?" Malik Obama was verified on Twitter long, long before Musk took it over, and he regularly made (and still makes) all sorts of outlandish claims about his half-brother—are these all to be considered implicitly true, on account of his profile having been Pre-Musk Verified?
- slantedview 3y ago
  The argument you make is that @SeymourHersh is no more authoritative a source of news and information than @FreedomLover837474, so why can't they both have blue checks. While true in theory, in practice, it turns out professional journalists are more reliable, which has led to people going elsewhere. Even if Twitter got it wrong with blue checks sometimes, by and large, the old approach led to a platform that was a vastly more reliable source of information than the cesspool we have today.
- jsnell 3y ago
  You're misunderstanding the GP. It isn't that Twitter verifying someone was notable had value. It is that they already knew that person X was notable, and Twitter verified it was indeed that person rather than an imposter.
  - 3y ago

habinero 3y ago

I do not understand the mindset that leads someone to be envious of checkmarks, of all things. Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable. It just signaled that person is who they said they were. There's this swath of people who want to be Notable and just aren't, and they think that painting a checkmark on themselves will fix it.

kbelder 3y ago
>I do not understand the mindset that leads someone to be envious of checkmarks I completely agree with you. >Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable. I completely disagree with you.
nvm0n2 3y ago
Originally blue check verification was heavily throttled and restricted only to people who were being impersonated. So it was a mark that you were worth impersonating, being somewhat correlated with being notable, hence why it became valuable to people.

chasd00 3y ago

I’m not sure why the parent is downvoted so badly. The blue checkmark was the hottest status symbol online for a long time. Now that anyone can pay, get verified, and have one the former online elite have to rub shoulders with the plebs and they don’t like it.

toofy 3y ago

> …it was crack cocaine for narcissistic journalists and media personalities… i think the mess of blue checks now shows that this issue absolutely isn’t limited to “journalists and media personalities” social media as a whole has shown us first hand the lengths people will go to in order to seek impressions. it’s pretty common to see regular people lie, manipulate, twist, etc… to get those impressions. in the past, We devised something called journalistic ethics which he expected those with a platform to put a good faith effort to follow those guidelines. this allowed us to make a distinction between signal and noise. of course this wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is. either way, we’ve seen pretty clearly now for quite a while that it isn’t some nefarious plot by former “narcissistic” journalists or whatever—people on every site do this, and people actually pay money for the checks on twitter now lol.