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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

> These shifts are occurring in an environment that has been stripped of many of the credibility signals that once helped users — blue ticks that indicated notability; fact-checks by the Twitter curation team, which was laid off last November; and labelling of deceptive content by the platform. ... Tracking the way these sudden reversals are affecting discourse on the platform can give us important insights into what could happen if others follow suit.

I’m disappointed that Nature has gotten into the business of dishonest hit pieces, but so be it. Blue checks were never a signal of credibility. When it comes to fact checks and labeling of deceptive content, Community Notes has done a much better job than the previous system, but isn’t even mentioned here.

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Ironically, the quality of Community Notes is directly correlated with the toxicity and division on the rest of Twitter. That's because the notes algorithm explicitly maximizes the distance between the users reviewing each note, i.e. a political note should be reviewed by both blue and red users. So the Community Notes system becomes more robust the more users disagree with each other.

Personally, I actually think Twitter should allow users to opt into making these tribal associations even more explicit. One simple feature could accomplish that: let users choose the color of their checkmark (red, blue or gray). When asking them to choose a color, show a list of the accounts they follow that have chosen each color.

So is red for american republicans or non-american communists?

It's whatever people want to self-sort themselves into...

You see how this isn't useful right? A signifier is only useful if the audience understands what it signifies.

The audience chooses by looking at which of the accounts they follow (and consider either in-group or out-group) have the blue or red badge.

Yes I understood your intent. So if I follow a mix of american leftists (blue) and european leftists (red) what color do you think I should pick?

The audience is people seeing my check, not me picking it. They won't read it in a consistent way and so I can't send a meaningful intentional signal by making this choice.

Notability isn't the same as credibility. Blue checks used to be useful so that you knew whether or not the person you were interacting with was who they said they were and had some cultural importance.

> Notability isn't the same as credibility.

I agree, which is why I am disputing the claim that the legacy bluecheck system was one of the "credibility signals that once helped users".

> Blue checks used to be useful so that you knew whether or not the person you were interacting with was who they said they were and had some cultural importance.

It was a status symbol for celebrities and corporate journalists. And it's not a status symbol that anyone else respected.

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