However, now, the conflation of paid features and the blue check makes me reticent to pay Twitter for features I want because it’s bundled with so-called status I don’t.
Success definitely seemed cool to consumers at the time rather than the old mentality of calling them "sellouts" in years prior. It usually meant decent press coverage, notability in some way (thus impersonation was damaging), or you'd hit 50 IMDb credits.
I do however agree that the current implementation of blue checks is absolutely meaningless and lends credibility to random people, as such, I don't browse Twitter anymore as the replies to tweets are full of "experts" claiming x without sources, but the blue check seems to convince a lot of people in terms of the weight of their argument if the stats on their tweets are anything to go by.
This is the crux of it: anyone get get one now. It no longer means you are verified or a notable person, it now only means you bought the Twitter Blue subscription!
But it’s still better than lending credibility to whoever Twitter thinks should have it.
I don’t want tech platforms like Twitter having that power.
It’s okay, Twitter has introduced different ways of doing that, too, with new flair distinct from the paid blue/gold checks.
I don’t want brands and influencers and celebrities. I don’t care how rich you are or what you’re in charge of. I want novelty, dialogue, curiosity, the odd hidden gem, and an absence of drama.
Surprisingly, given what some people would have you believe, I think Twitter delivers this fairly well if not perfectly, if you follow the right people.
The right people rarely have/ had blue checks (at least under the old model).
It certainly used to. But post-acquisition has been rough, and a lot of great folks have left. This will inevitably be a demographic thing. Does an exodus of x demographic mean Twitter is "dying"? No. But for me, it's largely no longer relevant to me. Even with 100,000+ tweets since Twitter launched, I never let go of my RSS feeds, and I likely never will. I've very little interest in Mastodon, not because it's not as-good as Twitter, but because it's a Twitter-like without fixing most of what wasn't great about Twitter.
Furthermore, most of who and what I'm interested in isn't on Mastodon, and likely never will be. The zeitgeist that birthed Twitter has come and gone, and you can't force it artificially as a mass exodus from one platform to another.
I never heard anyone talk about their blue check mark who didn’t sound like a tool.
I don’t need a blue check mark to know who the real Howard Stern is. I think the old blue check mark was a way for non-famous people to pretend they are as famous as famous people because they both had a blue check.
People should not trust an old blue check mark because it just meant that someone at twitter thought the person was reputable, but that’s not very useful. The new blue check isn’t that great either as all it means is someone paid $8. So at least they can be sued because they have an identity paying somewhere, or are more likely to be sued.
But I suppose the exact same way HN protects me from a John Carmack impersonator. The platform does nothing to protect me. And I don’t really care if someone impersonates him. If I did, I would check on his website or somewhere else that he publishes his HN handle.
Kind of like on AMAs when people post a photo saying their handle and the date.
I trust that more than the platform anyway.
Whereas for example, if someone isn't a major figure or org, but is somewhere in-between, what's to stop someone buying followers or rebranding an existing account and spouting nonsense? You might not value authenticity, but the average consumer placed a lot of importance in it.
Have people learned nothing with deepfakes? A picture isn't proof.
I don’t think a blue check mark pre acquisition met this requirement just as it doesn’t now.
Photos can be deepfaked, but there are ways to help against that. Like having the photo posted by a known person. I mean, users could deepfake the ids used for pre acquisition twitter, but I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
Just like I’ve never heard of anyone deepfaking their way past an AMA proof.
Uh, the blue checkmark used to mean they'd submitted ID and other docs, mate. It meant a great deal pre-acquisition.
For the vast majority of people who just read twitter, it meant nothing.
Such a weird take. So if there's two accounts claiming to be a game publisher, and they both have the same amount of followers, and one rips off the tweets of the other, using a script, can you at least concur that the blue check was useful and meaningful as it meant someone had verified their identity through documentation to Twitter?