Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

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Was it? It certainly seemed cool for many years. You only had to look at how much fanbases loved to see their favourite x get verified "at last". Not every community drags rising stars down by their ankles and instead celebrates success. Especially when you consider that their favourite x would now see supposedly well-deserved placement in the algorithm without spending on ads, and what's good for their favourite x is good for them as a trickledown effect, whether that's content, better products, or more art.

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.

It seemed cool to twitter people. But to normal people it didn’t matter.

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.

How do you propose protecting against a Howard Stern impersonator?

I’m not a Howard Stern listener or even a Twitter user, but in Stern’s case I guess I’d listen to his radio show to hear him say what his real Twitter handle is.

I’m not sure I need protection against a Howard Stern impersonator.

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.

IMO, HN and Twitter are not comparable. You can't follow people.

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.

There’s due diligence to follow people and the blue check mark shouldn’t remove the need for knowing who is the person you follow or at least what you do with their info.

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.

You're looking at it from the wrong side of the glass. Look at it from the consumer perspective, not whoever gets verified.

Uh, the blue checkmark used to mean they'd submitted ID and other docs, mate. It meant a great deal pre-acquisition.

Again, to normal people it meant nothing. To people who tweeted a lot and were into twitter (ie “twitter people”) it was important, but not in the real world.

For the vast majority of people who just read twitter, it meant nothing.

Uh, 450m people used Twitter monthly in 2022, that makes Twitter fairly "normal". What makes Twitter not the "real world"? It's a direct reflection of real events.

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?

Blue checks were definitely uncool. Maybe people felt it showed they were serious or famous, but that’s always been uncool as well. “Twitter blue check” is used in a derogatory manner for someone that is self important and not a free thinker, and has been for years now.

To me you are cool if you consistently add things (to Twitter, or wherever really) that I’m glad I saw, without being self aggrandising, overtly or excessively tribal, etc. and without hidden or perversely commercial incentives.

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).

> I think Twitter delivers this fairly well if not perfectly, if you follow the right people

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 do however agree that the current implementation of blue checks is absolutely meaningless and lends credibility to random people

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!

This is a reason they suck now.

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.

Sure, but now it will never have credibility. That's the tradeoff: either the check is discerning, or it is not. Musk agrees with you and thinks that Twitter should not be deciding who is "notable" or not, so now the check just means you are a subscriber. It will never mean anything more, because that's all it is.

> But it’s still better than lending credibility to whoever Twitter thinks should have it.

It’s okay, Twitter has introduced different ways of doing that, too, with new flair distinct from the paid blue/gold checks.

Yes, it was always really lame and silly.

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