Fundamental issue with current blue checks: given, not earned. (Yes there are some loose guidelines, but there are plenty of legacy "I knew someone at Twitter" people that make it inconsistent.) Either make it deterministic (for everyone that qualifies) or keep it extremely scarce. Middle ground is the problem.
But if the goal is to verify real people and remove the bots, they’d need to verify everyone. The scam bots aren’t verified but they still work on people.
This reminds me of "Building Web Reputation Systems." As a builder you highlight features that you think will benefit the community, and they become status badges. There are so many choices: total karma, years on the platform, etc. Stack Overflow and Reddit did decent iterative jobs, Twitter just stopped trying.
Agree middle ground doesn't work "Earned" is a hard concept not because of definition but because they want to optimize for quantity of users.
As a former teacher, it makes me nervous when things are “given” not “earned.” This small difference in language has huge implications for engagement and ownership.
Eventually this will be solved because I will be able to verify that a unique set of histories are mine. It's made easier as the value of spoofing is usually related to social capital resulting from a very specific history.
Hey man, I earned mine by bugging Yishan who emailed Jack. I'm taking this thing to the grave. You can have my blue-check when you pry it off my cold, dead profile!
new proposal actually looks pretty good? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587498907336118274
Isn’t Elon’s idea for the blue tick nothing but a soft KYC both in the way it’s “earned“ and how it governs access? It’s like the KYC version of “sufficiently decentralized” - you don’t need to go all the way to get the majority of the benefits
The fundamental issue for me is that having a status badge is the corniest thing i can possibly think of.
if verification to confer legitimacy (as opposed to status) is the goal then there’s no reason to restrict it, and every reason to make it widely available. i.e. bumble does it for free to help reduce phishing. adding a payment layer in between with Tw Blue will be an interesting experiment.
Would you ever consider a credibility marking symbol in Farcaster? Or even a community led approach to mark trusted voices?
what do you think about elon’s take of being able to just buy the blue checkmark? interesting dynamics here. it could, while not too authentic, reflect someone’s commitment to twitter.
Related: why are NFTs bought and not earned? I think there’s a huge opportunity for a new class of NFTs as digital badges of personal achievement. Have been building something in this vein https://vivacle.co
Social media networks (FB, YouTube) love to say identity verification improves content quality, when it really just increases advertising revenue. In this case content curation quality will decrease as the blue check ceases to mean anything.