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Comment by adamrezich | Hacker News Reader

Twitter owes most of its success to the Verified Checkmark, and the sorts of people who crave any kind of Officially Verified status that they can lord over the plebs who don't have such access—it was crack cocaine for self-important, narcissistic journalists and media personalities. once anyone could purchase a Verified Checkmark, once the doors to the Secret Cool Kid Clubhouse were thrown wide open, about half of the appeal of the platform (for them) disappeared overnight.

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That is such a cynical take.

For me, the value of the verified checkmark was that it verified people and organizations were who they said they were.

This was a big part of what made Twitter such a unique and fascinating place. You could learn a huge amount about the world from tweets that were attached to verified identities.

Plus it was really fun. This tweet by Monica Lewinsky really wouldn't have landed without that verified mark! https://twitter.com/MonicaLewinsky/status/115034806144255180...

Unfortunately, Musk apparently had the same cynical opinion of this that you have, and threw the entire thing away. No wonder Twitter has less cultural impact today than it did a year ago.

X has a ton of cultural impact today—it’s just that the audience has shifted from neoliberal to classical liberal/libertarian. Lots of politics, philosophy, tech news, and culture thrives. It’s just not happening in your bubble evidently.

What on earth do you think ‘neoliberal’ means?

Are you claiming there has been a mass exodus of Thatcherite/Reaganomic thinkers supportive of the Chicago School of market led small state capitalism from the platform?

I guess I don’t see many Pinochet apologists on Twitter these days.

I suggest a quick read of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Neoliberal is a general purpose snarl word meaning, roughly, "stealth reactionary". Drew DeVault, for example, describes Hackernews as neoliberal because it does not do enough to muzzle Nazis and signal-boost progressives.

That sounds like the exact opposite of what the original poster intended. And I’m pretty sure when either Drew DeVault or the OP is picturing a neoliberal neither is thinking of Margaret Thatcher.

I guess words don’t have to mean things any more.

there were plenty of famous/noteworthy people who Twitter refused to verify, and plenty of completely non-noteworthy people who they did verify. I'm not sure why you're pretending that any famous/noteworthy person could be and was verified, because this was never, ever the case.

when Musk implemented cheap paid verification subscriptions, the first thing most of the formerly-exclusively-verified journalist-type users (that I follow, at least) did was post links to their profiles on new Twitter-clone platforms they were moving to, which, if investigated, revealed that they once again had a special "Verified" or "Verified Journalist" tag on their profiles there as well.

surely you're not implying that my analysis has zero merit and that nobody who was verified on Twitter before paid verification subscriptions were implemented was ever in it for the self-important narcissism?

I interpreted your original comment as suggesting that most/all of the people who cared about verification were self-important narcissists.

If someone got verified for narcissistic reasons it didn't particularly affect me: there were plenty of verified accounts that I paid no attention to at all.

I cared about the verified accounts where the verified user or organization was noteworthy and interesting to me.

Turns out that democratizing blue checkmarks solved one problem, but created another, in that it became much harder to vet reliable information on twitter, and intentionally misleading tweets would be boosted above those from professional journalists. The gaza war has been a flood of misinformation and spam. Community notes seems to be mostly good, but is utterly incapable of keeping up with the flood of misinformation.

And so, overall, taking away blue checkmarks from professionals and giving them to spammers has been a net loss for Twitter, at least for those of us who appreciate good information.

Nothing was "democratized," it was commodified.

> verification subscriptions

It's not verification anymore though, is it? It's just an icon that you get when you pay a monthly fee. AFAIK there is no verification step.

This kind of argument-against-perfection / argument-against-absolutes is so transparently useless. It may be that I've just been noticing it more, but it seems more common lately.

Perfection of any kind does not exist in the physical world, so any test against perfection will fail - it's simply a matter of phrasing to choose what you want to identify as failing.

The test isn't whether All or Every such-and-such meets some test, it's the current state (do many or most meet the test?) and the direction (are more or fewer meeting the test?) that matters.

Twitter owed much of its success to drawing a large number of people who had become famous for doing well in their fields, and as a reader I could trust that they were actually those people because of the blue checkmark.

Once that went away, those people started to leave, and Twitter descended into a morass of nonsense, as they were replaced by people who never did anything notable in their lives but were jealous of the attention given to those who had.

> and as a reader I could trust that they were actually those people because of the blue checkmark.

why was this? what authoritative power over verifiable notability did Twitter once have, such that this could possibly be the case for anyone who thinks about it for longer than two seconds, or encounters their first instance of, "ok but why was this person verified while this other person isn't?"

Malik Obama was verified on Twitter long, long before Musk took it over, and he regularly made (and still makes) all sorts of outlandish claims about his half-brother—are these all to be considered implicitly true, on account of his profile having been Pre-Musk Verified?

The argument you make is that @SeymourHersh is no more authoritative a source of news and information than @FreedomLover837474, so why can't they both have blue checks. While true in theory, in practice, it turns out professional journalists are more reliable, which has led to people going elsewhere.

Even if Twitter got it wrong with blue checks sometimes, by and large, the old approach led to a platform that was a vastly more reliable source of information than the cesspool we have today.

You're misunderstanding the GP. It isn't that Twitter verifying someone was notable had value. It is that they already knew that person X was notable, and Twitter verified it was indeed that person rather than an imposter.

Precisely. I don't think it was the case that people were blindingly trusting anything that came from a blue-check account. That doesn't even make sense, since many of them were contradicting each other.

What it did allow, was quickly scanning through a sea of replies to find the ones that might come from someone with more authority or experience on a topic than SassySam123123, and then feeling confident that the post that purported to be from the Foreign Minister actually was. This was of course unpopular with SassySam123123.

Verification didn't mean "this person is worth listening to and this person is not".

It was a signal that you could use as part of your own evaluation of what was worth paying attention to.

It had nothing to do with whether or not something was true.

The fact that some said some wild thing - true or not - is still an interesting piece of information, when the verification process demonstrates that it really IS that person saying that thing.

Originally that was true, but as Twitter got ever more woke it stopped meaning that and became blurred with endorsement. From Wikipedia:

Twitter faced backlash in November 2017 when it verified the account of Jason Kessler, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist. The backlash forced Twitter to pause its verification program.[9] Several days later, Twitter removed Spencer and Kessler's verification statuses.[10] Likewise, Twitter had removed verification from Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos for violating its policies in January, signaling Twitter verification implied endorsement.

For the majority of readers, for whom I presume getting the latest updates fresh from the lips of renowned neo-Nazis was not a high priority, I don't think this represented a significant drop in the blue check's value.

Either you are saying that in fact not having prominent neo-Nazis' content tagged as coming from notable sources was a meaningful problem, or you are making a slippery-slope argument with no clear indication of why we were headed to a problematic part of the slope. In either case it doesn't seem persuasive.

I'm pointing out that simonw's claim about what verification meant wasn't true by the start of the Musk era.

Leftists call anyone to the right of themselves a Nazi so your claims about specific individuals are uninteresting.

… Wait, what did you think the verification was _for_? It wasn’t to verify that everything he said was true; I can’t imagine anyone was stupid enough to think that. It was to verify that he _was who he said he was_.

I’m not sure why the parent is downvoted so badly. The blue checkmark was the hottest status symbol online for a long time. Now that anyone can pay, get verified, and have one the former online elite have to rub shoulders with the plebs and they don’t like it.

I do not understand the mindset that leads someone to be envious of checkmarks, of all things. Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable. It just signaled that person is who they said they were.

There's this swath of people who want to be Notable and just aren't, and they think that painting a checkmark on themselves will fix it.

>I do not understand the mindset that leads someone to be envious of checkmarks

I completely agree with you.

>Nobody thought that a checkmark made you notable.

I completely disagree with you.

Originally blue check verification was heavily throttled and restricted only to people who were being impersonated. So it was a mark that you were worth impersonating, being somewhat correlated with being notable, hence why it became valuable to people.

> …it was crack cocaine for narcissistic journalists and media personalities…

i think the mess of blue checks now shows that this issue absolutely isn’t limited to “journalists and media personalities”

social media as a whole has shown us first hand the lengths people will go to in order to seek impressions. it’s pretty common to see regular people lie, manipulate, twist, etc… to get those impressions.

in the past, We devised something called journalistic ethics which he expected those with a platform to put a good faith effort to follow those guidelines. this allowed us to make a distinction between signal and noise.

of course this wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is.

either way, we’ve seen pretty clearly now for quite a while that it isn’t some nefarious plot by former “narcissistic” journalists or whatever—people on every site do this, and people actually pay money for the checks on twitter now lol.

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