The more complicated reality of how the checkmark works is that Twitter wants to have things both ways: the checkmarks promote accounts, and Twitter benefits from the increased engagement resulting from promoted accounts, and promoted accounts benefit from the exclusivity of the checkmark. But promoting accounts also puts Twitter on the hook, perceptually, for what some of those accounts say, so Twitter also has a fig leaf notion of the checkmark as simply a "verification system". But it's obviously not that.
The fact some people crave being famous enough to merit a checkmark is not a problem with checkmarks. People chase status of all kinds.
It's no longer for simply verifying authenticity.
His profile claimed he was a Buzzfeed reporter IIRC. Although he was being satirical, he didn’t indicate such, and this causes problems because the whole point of the checkmark is to signal that this person is who they say they are (including any claims in their bio). Since the average random person doesn’t even know who Milo is, they may see his verified profile and attribute his inflammatory comments to Buzzfeed staff members.
Twitter has many examples of taking enforcement actions for silly reasons, but this one actually made sense given that logic.
Twitter knew who Milo was, they'd verified his identity, and although he broke the rules, removing the checkmark told his followers one thing: "we now know anyone Twitter verifies is someone they agree with politically". This puts them on the hook for everybody who's verified.
It should be a verification only. If they didn't like what he said then they should've removed the account.
But i agree, in practice it's a "twitter endorses this account" indicator.
I'm positive Twitter would allow a mainstream-supporting liberal (i.e. someone who vocally supported Clinton or supports Buttigieg or Biden or Bloomberg) to slide on this, like any time someone would jokingly pretend they're part of Fox News. Stephen Colbert, if he had a Twitter account that was equivalent to his satirical character on his Comedy Central show, would be adored and absolutely allowed to get a nice fat bluecheck on his hypothetical Twitter.
Real names aren't required here. You can call yourself whatever you want.
In actual practice, the community does appear to care whether or not it knows who the hell you actually are. It does appear to correlate to some degree to ranking on the leader board.
So I wrote a ranty personal blog post about that at some point and went through the top names on the leader board. My point was: How do I hide my identity to hide my gender and also establish a professional reputation? This doesn't work. If you know my name, you can readily infer my gender.
I posted for years under a two letter handle that can be mistaken for a feminist handle though it wasn't intended to be any such thing and I had it six weeks before it occurred to me anyone might see it that way. It was supposed to be initials from some handle I had elsewhere and I typoed it.
I had blog posts on a personal blog explaining my handle and that it wasn't a feminist handle. After I finally hit the leader board, I became extremely uncomfortable with continuing to use that handle.
I felt there were too many eyes on me and if I needed to explain it, it wasn't a good handle under which to have that kind of visibility. So I changed to my actual first and middle name.
The first week or two, I got accused of trying to pull a fast one and trick people and ridiculous stuff like that. After that settled down, HN treated me dramatically better than it ever had under my previous handle.
Obviously, there are many confounding factors and you can't definitively prove that it's any one thing. But I think if you are establishing a relationship with a community, there is no clear distinction between "I choose to behave X way because of how I expect that to impact me." and "Other people behave X way towards me." Those things create a feedback loop and you can't completely tease out how much people find them credible because they know their name and reputation, so they upvote it and how much people make an effort to say good things.
I don't think I behave differently since changing my handle, but I certainly have a much more positive experience of the forum since changing it. So that influences my feeling that other people do care about such things.
I've been here more than ten years. I literally spent years doing all the stuff people say to do here to network, get taken seriously, etc.
It wasn't working because I got treated differently by essentially everyone due to my gender.
I was literally homeless for nearly six years and frequently going hungry while being blown off and told sexism wasn't a real problem.
You no doubt mean well. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Given that I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board, it doesn't appear to be me mishandling things. All the evidence suggests that I'm the most successful openly female member here in terms of getting accepted by the community, etc. And it has seriously sucked in a "The rampant sexism is going to help kill me" kind of way and this has been true for a great many years.
It's only in recent months that I'm beginning to get anything resembling what I wanted all along out if it. I'm quite clear this is largely due to my gender.
It's not really anything I care to discuss further. It gets me a great deal of flak to talk about all that. I've really gone to substantial pains under enormously difficult circumstance to minimize the focus on my gender and the BS I had to deal with because of it while being accused of making a big deal out of nothing, etc ad nauseum.
What did you want out of it?
There's a leader board?
Twitter is: 1. Used by the mainstream almost globally (HN is used by the fringe) 2. Real-time global messages in all languages 3. Used by the president
I can go on but to because of these reasons the value of tweet cannot be based on the actual conversation.
HN iS different because of the hard work of YC partners and the caliber of HN community. HN would have been occupied by thugs long time ago to do astroturfing on behalf of big companies. Here is an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383746
> a pseudonym doesn't mean it's not a conversation not worth having
You are arguing against a point of view that you made up by taking a statement out of context. That is wholly dishonest (and/or lazily indifferent to raising more noise).
The discussion is about verified identity and what that means. Whether you think it is valuable to discuss the finer points of my family with someone (lets say... pretending to be my grandfather) via a twitter blue checkmark is irrelevant to the discussion.