Twitter had verification based on the account's noteworthiness, and now it doesn't. That was one of the main features of Twitter, and now Threads.net has it.

Threads copies verification from Instagram which is mostly celebrities, public figures, brands, etc. You may not agree with the choices of noteworthiness, but they are at least checked for validity. https://help.instagram.com/854227311295302

Twitter has verification which is "anyone with spare change who wants to shout louder than others".

The way Twitter verification used to work and why was of any value to other users was that, if your twitter name was, idk, the name of an important politician or company, the blue checkmark meant that someone at twitter took some amount of care to check that you're actually that politician or company. Like, "verified" meant that twitter verfied their identity, tying the twitter account to some sort of external credentials. You used to know that you're talking to the actual company support team or whatever.

Now it just means someone paid some amount of money. They're "verified" in the sense of like verifying the email address you used to sign up with to an olde timey web forum, and maybe that you're probably not an absolutely minimum effort spam/scam bot. However the "verified" checkmark is still basically useless because it doesn't verify an identity or credentials anymore, and it's easy enough for bad actors to get the checkmark to then impersonate some brand or website or whatever, and have their posts get privileged by The Algorithm.

So, previously "verified" status was useful for people to be able to tell that the posts they're reading are really from who they think they're from. Now, "verified" status means that bad actors and bad posters get their posts boosted ahead of normal posts, so the replies to any mildly popular thread are going to be full of attempted scams and tepid takes. It's become completely useless for its original purpose and makes content discovery worse.

I've never used Instagram, but I noticed all of the blue checks on Threads were famous people. Pay-to-play verification would kind of ruin it. Meta could have really built on their advantage over Twitter's blunders.

IG verification still requires validating your government ID matching your account name/bio, no? Twitter is just "do you have a working credit card #"?

This is one of the bullet points; no clue how strictly they enforce it:

• Notable: Your account must represent a well-known, highly searched for person, brand or entity. We review accounts that are featured in multiple news sources, and we don't consider paid or sponsored media content as sources for review.