X obviously isn't the only platform where this is taking place and it is curious as to why they rolled it back.
how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff.
A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so.
Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designed to generate profit that in fact benefits from disorder, not a means of real world problem solving, the ostensible point of meaningful communication.
Upholding at least some utterly basic foundational values of humanity doesn't require holding any stake.
Verified residency is better than nothing for putting real money on the table. Although if you've been to a local town meeting, you'll know it's still not perfect.
Except human across the planet doesn't even agree on those "foundational values". What seems obvious and fundamental to us, often isn't to others.
I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to prevent sock puppets somehow.
If you allow pseudonymity you would get some interesting dynamic conversations, while if you enforced a real name policy I think it would end up like a ghost town version of LinkedIn. (Many people don’t want to be honest on a “face” account.) The biggest problem with current pseudonymous networks like X/Twitter is you have no idea if the other person really has a stake in the discussion.
Also, if ID were verified and you could somehow determine that a person has previously registered for the service, bans would have teeth and true bad actors would eventually be expelled. It would be better to have a forgiving suspension/ban policy because of this, with gradually increasing penalties and reasonable appeals in case of moderation mistakes.
the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.
this X feature does make it interesting like for example engaging with US politics while shouldnt stop commentary from foreigners it definitely should contain the limits of perception meddling
> the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.
The same would happen if people knew your IRL identity on a social site, see all the attempted “cancellations” on both sides of the aisle these last few years.
My small neighborhood has a non-anonymous chat group, which is 2-3 streets (~50 houses) inside a village which is inside a city. It is basically just a mini nextdoor but without ads or conspiracies.
I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.
Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.
(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)
I took a look at some X profile's I know where they're based, and a couple of other random, and I can see "Account based in" and "Connected via" for all of them, just logged in as a free user.
Is it possible they enabled it back again?
I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.
One side has largely left X.
We're on a thread about widespread fake/inauthentic users on Twitter right now. I see very little reason to trust those numbers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/03/threads-...
Hmm, interesting insight, what did they each say when you talked to them?
The problem with not using a cloak was that you'd stand a very real chance of getting DDoS'd or, worse, outright hacked (made easier by the fact that in ye olde modem days, your computer was directly exposed to the Internet with no firewall/NAT to protect you), and even with using a cloak and a NAT router you'd still have trolls sending "DCC SEND" [1] into channels, immediately yeeting a bunch of people with old shoddy middleboxes.
> Accounts registered after March 2024 that have a verified email address are automatically assigned a generic user cloak. If your account does not currently have a cloak, you may contact staff to receive one.
And I don’t think he’s been trying all that hard either.
Instead they built better sycophants
And let’s be honest, you know what you’d do too if it was you.
Do it enough times, and you end up with yes men that also force other people into the meat grinder well enough you don’t have to care, directly.
It’s a type of genius. It works best when you embrace that everyone wants to suck up to you anyway, and there are always more flunkies where they came from, so you’re really helping the world out by filtering down to the somewhat effective ones ASAP.
its got the followers because the followers want to read and reshare it.
id maybe like to see the location of origin as a pie chart on the followers list, as well as on what theyre following, but if the idea is good(for whatever definition if good)
is being american even particularly relevant? i dont think the random guy in indiana's opinions on Mamdani are any more relevant than a random guy in nigeria's.