Unfortunately that’s how I’m beginning to see this too, a sign of old school nepotism and struggle to regain lost status. We’ve seen how this unfolded for Twitter.
Even before the takeover accounts could be "unverified", which makes a mockery of the concept of verification.
Why? Accounts can be sold/hacked, and there is a lot of that on social media. A verified account may even be a higher value target for some of the reasons you're bringing up, like algorithm boosts, verifications being considered an endorsement. In either case, unverification not only makes sense, but should be expected.
I'm talking about people, who are still verifiably the same people, becoming unverified.
Yes, where accounts have changed hands, or changed identity, they should be unverified.
That's actually one of the cases where twitter did not un-verify. Accounts "earned" the blue-check then changed identity to something else, appearing "verified" as that new identity.
If that's what you were talking about, you should have said that. Accounts are not people. This is not pedantry (and calling me names doesn't prove anything, either).
If I’m able to register a company with a name that matches your username, should I be able to get a verified account with the handle “real_xnorswap”?
Such things could be ripe for abuse. Although to be fair a social media platform might be able to push some of the blame onto the corporate registries.
If you're not claiming to be me, then I can't see why you shouldn't be able to use the name xnorswap, especially if that's your company name. I don't own the name, and if you have your own presence under that name, I can't see the issue.
Even trademarks only cover a company's particular domain. See the long history of Apple Corps vs Apple Computers
In my view this is how verification ought to work:
- A user writes a bio / about field
- A trust provider verifies that bio is factual
- Any change to that bio will cause their bio to become unverified until it can be re-verified. ( The bio change can be held back until verification can complete. )
- An appeals process exists
How "trust providers" are established without leading to excess centralisation is a difficult problem. This is especially true given that like moderation, it's an expensive thing to do.
There is the possibility of trust-chains such as the way Lobsters works, but there's a exposed to the masses I suspect that people just mass-verify everything without any checking.
In reality you'd be left with one or two central pillars that people trust, and everything else which people don't.
There's also the danger that too much verification leaves new users in the cold. If 90% of genuine users are "verified", then a brand new user doesn't have much chance of making it through filters to become known enough to hope for verification, and will find themselves ignored and effectively locked out. ( This is already the case for some platforms where you're effectively required to give your phone number else end up in the "probably a bot" pile and de-facto shadow-banned. )
There's a pretty good retrospective written up on this blog[0].
In short: originally the purpose was nothing more "this account belongs to the person they claim to be and we've directly verified this with them". Unfortunately, people habitually misinterpreted the checkmark as not just being verification but also a tacit endorsement of the account by Twitter the company. Which isn't great when you get a high profile controversial event and it's lead organizer has a verified Twitter account.
After that, they appended an "in good standing" qualifier, and it quickly devolved into a "you know a person who knows a person who knows a person" situation since they also announced a public pause of the program. (Notably, the ID check, while it existed, was pretty much abandoned. Twitter at some point began demanding ID scans to report things to their support, but that obviously never actually translated to a blue check.)
Musk's version of it is hilariously simplistic, but also robs it of any and all value: just pay money for it and you'll get it. It works in the sense that it confirms the poster has a bank account (although this probably doesn't confirm much in and of itself), but any and all value of said verification is minimal because any old hack/scammer can do that.
Verification is a difficult system to get right and people have all sorts of pre-baked in ideas on how it should work versus how it actually works and the use of a checkmark played a part into how Twitters version was perceived over the years. (As well as Twitters own unreliability in being consistent about what it means.)
Huge swathe of accounts who got in early and had friends at Twitter got verified and had priority standing in algorithms and moderator reports just based on that not on the merit of their posts.
Oh you could also pay Twitter employees $20K under the table to be verified too.
It started well with good intentions and the initial rollout solved the problem. It then turned into a status symbol and hidden caste system. When Elon took over and turned it into a game, all cred was lost.
It was a "hidden caste system" with no real consequences for people's interaction with the platform. I have approximately zero sympathy with the "anti-bluecheck" resentments that Musk tapped into.
When Elon took over; the rules were clearly laid out: buy your checkmark for $7/month (not sure of the price). Pay and you get it; stop paying and you loose it. Everybody knows exactly what it means.
Before that it was: "Someone will give you the checkmark if they like what you say enough and/or if you are deemed 'popular enough' according to an obscure committee; likely a combination of both. But there is a certain threshold above which it does not matter what you way, and you will always be verified". You could loose your checkmark on the whim of some dude who got his latte order wrong in the morning. No one was ever given the rulebook. In fact there was no rulebook. Checkmark just meant "I went to a bar with a Twitter employee and we agreed on a lot of things".
The same thing will happen to Bluesky. The system is akin to how CA and SSL does work with a critical difference. To get an SSL certificate, there is a clear step-by-step guide on how to get it. And after it has been granted it isn't revoked regardless of wether DigiCert agrees with the content of your website.
>When Elon took over; the rules were clearly laid out: buy your checkmark for $7/month (not sure of the price). Pay and you get it; stop paying and you loose it. Everybody knows exactly what it means.
except then he was also randomly giving out checkmarks to people who didn't want them and specifically told him to remove them
In my humble opinion: The basic premise is itself is wrong. Why should BlueSky (or X or Mastodon) should be the sole arbitrator of truth? Who are these prophets that we need to preserve the sanctity of their messages?
If I want to hear what a journalist has to say, I would go to their official website like NYT or Tagesspeigel and read it there. Should we be interested in what Kim Sang yun or Sebastian Mustermann has said few minutes ago?
The problem of spam and impersonation goes way beyond Blue Checks.
They definitely did not say that and what is this constant need for people on the internet to respond to someone saying "maybe this isn't the right way to do something" with "Oh well then you're saying that something can't be done at all and it's pointless and why even try!!!11"
> You are borderline arguing that information is bad
Your words not mine.
I questioned why sites like X or BlueSky or Reddit can be sole in charge of who is "verified" and Real™. We can listen to what the Journalists, UN officials etc have to say on their own media websites, right?
This is some grade A navelgazing. This is an actual, real, practical problem that decreases the signal to noise ratio in these communities. Spammers pretend to be popular people and use it to scam, steal, and otherwise take advantage of people. It's a good thing to reduce that and makes the service better for everyone.
