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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

The argument about blue ticks being deceptive seems dumb as a reason for a fine, they had always been a popularity/insider contacts game, now they're available to anyone willing to tie their account to a credit card. Nothing about them back when X was still called Twitter made people with checkmarks more trustworthy.

It was pretty common to run into checkmarks who were actually literal nobodies, and it was common for popular content creators who do not show their face or real name to not be able to get it despite suffering from impersonators, especially for creators who were not based in the West.

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Being verified made you trustworthy in the sense that it signified that Twitter trusted the account. If you trusted Twitter, then you could sort of infer a kind of trust relationship with that account, in that it was trusted by an authority you trust.

Getting verified was just a popularity/insider contacts game, for sure. But now that trust relationship is sort of up for grabs, and there are a litany of people who (at a glance) will trust accounts with that mark if they see posts from them. This is ripe for exploitation by bad actors.

> It was pretty common to run into checkmarks who were actually literal nobodies

Why does that matter? It was a guarantee that the account was verified. The word "verified" meant that the account belonged to the actual person. Now it means nothing except that the user is a suscriber who gets their posts boosted in replies.

Even if the old Twitter only verified exactly one person ever, it would still be better than the current state.

What does "the account belonged to the actual person" mean if they're a literal nobody? If a literal nobody happens to have my same name and know someone on the inside to verify them, does that mean they're the real me as far as Twitter is concerned? and on the other hand, lots of popular creators don't use their real identity on their Twitter profile, do they not deserve to be 'verified' because they aren't the actual person?

The checkmark now is better because it's no longer an arbitrarily handed down status symbol, it indicates that the user has enough of a presence on the account to pay for it and wait the couple of days it takes for the checkmark to show up.

Honestly I don’t care. I can tell the difference between old blue check and new blue check, but by retaining the exact same representation can be considered deceptive whatever the merits or otherwise of the previous system.

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