Are Blue Checks Uncool Now?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Paying for that medal dilutes its value to almost nothing. It also changes the incentives for those that pay, vs those who received the status from Twitter directly. The fact that Stephen King and Lebron James were 'gifted' paid blue checks after publicly rejecting them kinda says it all: it's not about democratizing reach, it's a pay-to-play scheme, but the actual popular kids aren't paying a cent.
If you want some evidence, take a look at the types of accounts that have the "paid for" checkmark. The majority of them are shilling courses, AI, crypto, MLMs or conspiracies.
I never trusted blue checks. I would regularly see fake accounts in the pre-Musk days and I regularly see fake accounts today. But I do take pleasure in the wounded egos caused by the new system.
Got some examples?
Never once saw any of this.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A more insightful question is "were they ever cool?" It's hard to think of any company or figure, before or after the Twitter purchase, where them gaining a blue check made them "cool", or even fractionally moreso.
Instead they did something that was kind of confusing and not helpful. Twitter didn’t have a systematic way of being “significant” so it would just kind of be haphazardly applied.
Lebron James is famous, but he is known already so doesn’t need a blue check. (Just have an ama verification image somewhere in profile) It was all the other seemingly random people that had blue check marks that meant nothing to me.
Subreddits often attach flair to notable posters.
I would unfollow people who are dumb enough to retweet a fake lebron so it’s very unlikely fake lebron would end up in my feed.
But I don’t need to verify every account. I’m not making life or death decisions so if someone retweets real lebron or fake lebron I don’t care.
It’s definitely likely that subtle parodies go over my head frequently.
I didn’t understand the rush to remove checks for existing notable accounts - and then forcing checks on folks and claiming they were paying is absolutely pathetic.
I share this because I was part of target market and was open to paying. If I cancelled mine I’ve got to imagine others will too - be interesting to get some data
Turning blue check into a paid service with features seems reasonable to me. I have no incentive to be prioritised in threads or be seen by more people: I’m not trying to sell services, or bring people to my platform to make some ad revenue, etc. For those that do, it makes sense, and I feel sorry for the people that are torn between a cheap way of getting exposure and a crowd of bullies who mock them for it.
It also makes sense that people with large followings get it for free, because they’re contributing to the platform. I saw people comparing their free subscription without consent to “r*pe” and, well, there’s no reasoning with that kind of lunatic.
OTOH it’s extremely funny to see blue check accounts with 12 followers, especially ones that have been active for years and just post photos of their dog every few days. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? WHY ARE THEY PAYING IT MAKES NO SENSE
It'll be interesting to see. For my part, the most embarrassing thing is watching people fall over themselves claiming they didn't pay for their checkmark.
But it is quite clear that among the set of people who cared about blue checks, they're no longer valuable.
This hasn't made sense to me. Isn't it more embarrassing that Musk is forcing the blue checkmark on people in order to make it seem more popular? Users aren't buying, and he's trying to astroturf support for it.
By comparison, I don't actively choose to follow Twitter product changes so I don't care about them in that way.
That's just how it is with me. I think it's probably the common view.
There's this weird narrative going around that people are "freaking out" about Musk paying for their blue check, and it's totally made up. The real reaction is just confusion. Who's ever heard of a CEO so desperate that he pays to make his subscription service look more popular?
It's fine. Fortunately, Twitter is exactly the technology for me: I unfollowed him and we're both rid of each other.
It's more the muddying of blue checks of "notable people" with "paid so you can hear their weird terminally online rants".
(@BlockTheBlue had twice the followers that Blue had paying subscribers when it was blocked.)