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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 th

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.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    Precisely. I don't think it was the case that people were blindingly trusting anything that came from a blue-check account. That doesn't even make sense, since many of them were contradicting each other. What it did allow, was quickly scanning through a sea of replies to find the ones that might come from someone with more authority or experience on a topic than SassySam123123, and then feeling confident that the post that purported to be from the Foreign Minister actually was. This was of course unpopular with SassySam123123.
- simonw 3y ago
  Verification didn't mean "this person is worth listening to and this person is not". It was a signal that you could use as part of your own evaluation of what was worth paying attention to. It had nothing to do with whether or not something was true. The fact that some said some wild thing - true or not - is still an interesting piece of information, when the verification process demonstrates that it really IS that person saying that thing.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    Originally that was true, but as Twitter got ever more woke it stopped meaning that and became blurred with endorsement. From Wikipedia: Twitter faced backlash in November 2017 when it verified the account of Jason Kessler, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist. The backlash forced Twitter to pause its verification program.[9] Several days later, Twitter removed Spencer and Kessler's verification statuses.[10] Likewise, Twitter had removed verification from Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos for violating its policies in January, signaling Twitter verification implied endorsement.
    - nerdbert 3y ago
      For the majority of readers, for whom I presume getting the latest updates fresh from the lips of renowned neo-Nazis was not a high priority, I don't think this represented a significant drop in the blue check's value. Either you are saying that in fact not having prominent neo-Nazis' content tagged as coming from notable sources was a meaningful problem, or you are making a slippery-slope argument with no clear indication of why we were headed to a problematic part of the slope. In either case it doesn't seem persuasive.
      - nvm0n2 3y ago
        I'm pointing out that simonw's claim about what verification meant wasn't true by the start of the Musk era. Leftists call anyone to the right of themselves a Nazi so your claims about specific individuals are uninteresting.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  … Wait, what did you think the verification was _for_? It wasn’t to verify that everything he said was true; I can’t imagine anyone was stupid enough to think that. It was to verify that he _was who he said he was_.

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.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  Precisely. I don't think it was the case that people were blindingly trusting anything that came from a blue-check account. That doesn't even make sense, since many of them were contradicting each other. What it did allow, was quickly scanning through a sea of replies to find the ones that might come from someone with more authority or experience on a topic than SassySam123123, and then feeling confident that the post that purported to be from the Foreign Minister actually was. This was of course unpopular with SassySam123123.
simonw 3y ago
Verification didn't mean "this person is worth listening to and this person is not". It was a signal that you could use as part of your own evaluation of what was worth paying attention to. It had nothing to do with whether or not something was true. The fact that some said some wild thing - true or not - is still an interesting piece of information, when the verification process demonstrates that it really IS that person saying that thing.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Originally that was true, but as Twitter got ever more woke it stopped meaning that and became blurred with endorsement. From Wikipedia: Twitter faced backlash in November 2017 when it verified the account of Jason Kessler, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist. The backlash forced Twitter to pause its verification program.[9] Several days later, Twitter removed Spencer and Kessler's verification statuses.[10] Likewise, Twitter had removed verification from Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos for violating its policies in January, signaling Twitter verification implied endorsement.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    For the majority of readers, for whom I presume getting the latest updates fresh from the lips of renowned neo-Nazis was not a high priority, I don't think this represented a significant drop in the blue check's value. Either you are saying that in fact not having prominent neo-Nazis' content tagged as coming from notable sources was a meaningful problem, or you are making a slippery-slope argument with no clear indication of why we were headed to a problematic part of the slope. In either case it doesn't seem persuasive.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      I'm pointing out that simonw's claim about what verification meant wasn't true by the start of the Musk era. Leftists call anyone to the right of themselves a Nazi so your claims about specific individuals are uninteresting.
rsynnott 3y ago
… Wait, what did you think the verification was _for_? It wasn’t to verify that everything he said was true; I can’t imagine anyone was stupid enough to think that. It was to verify that he _was who he said he was_.