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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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