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Comment by qull | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't exactly free, but a crony system from what I can tell. Honestly feels way too cheap at 5$ for what it is and the unjustified weight it carries.

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I'll pay $5 to be verified and then hopefully have an option to filter out every account that isn't verified

Indeed. As Hubert Humphrey said: "Everyone has a right to speak, but nobody has the right to be heard."

Okay I'm wrong. The correct quote is: “The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.” ― Hubert H. Humphrey

Maybe if he'd lived into the internet age, he'd have gone with my quote. There ain't time to hear everybody on the net, or Twitter.

That option should be free though. The 90, 9, 1 rule applies strongly to twitter. Elon and team should try and milk the 1% for a lot of cash and make the experience pleasant for the 90% who just read it all.

Oh sure the filter should be free for everyone, why not. It just makes the verified accounts even more valuable

I believe that Lithuania has an electronic ID system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_identity_card#As_el...

that's been working. I think we're behind the curve here; it should be easy to very strongly verify my identiry to any online business I choose to do that with; without government taking the lead, every damn company is going to be expensively reinventing that wheel.

Most companies shouldn't need this information. I don't give my id to most businesses I visit in person. The ability for online services to "verify" me does not need to be easy and it doesn't need to be cheap otherwise it will just be abused.

But if you're out in public and you start shouting harmful, hateful or abusive messages there can be real-world consequences.

On Twitter you can be the most vile person possible with absolutely no fear as you're entirely anonymous.

But bots can't walk into most businesses in person. My point is that I don't want to hear from an account that isn't at least verified to be set up by a verified specific human being.

And you should be able to filter to only accounts that are verified and pay $5/month. I think this is an issue with twitter and their product. "verification" is one possible solution. But, other product changes would probably work better. E.g., I rarely have such negative interactions on hacker news and they don't even require a CC or a phone.

Agreed, and I want to see more than one change and some experimentation, too.

Twitter’s blue checkmark isn’t just authentication. The reason anyone cares about it is that it means “I’m a somebody”.

I understand, but unless via a crony system, (which has obvious problems, re free speech) it's hard to do that kind of IDing without expense. However, I would like to see a not-someboy-but-a-verified-specific-human-not-bot account designation, too.

So to flesh this out, I'd like to see three or four kinds of members on Twitter. All would be authenticated in one sense: their real names would be known to the site and verified. But...

1) Some users would pay extra to be anonymous or pseudonymous to users of the site (but not to corporate Twitter)

2) Most users would be under the real verified name but no blue check to say this is their real name. No charge (unless just for the initial verification, maybe.)

3) Blue check users pay to show everyone they are not just a person, or just a person of the same name shown, but a person (or company) of note with that name. (And the most well-known person with that name.)

4)? "Ordinary" or less well-known people should be able to pay a little for, say, a blue circle (but no check) that shows they are not pseudonymous accounts and any geographical location, job description given has been verified.

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