I'm sure many of the conversations you've had on HN and elsewhere has been with people under pseudonyms. Just because they are using a pseudonym doesn't mean it's not a conversation not worth having. The value should be based on the actual conversation, not under what circumstance it's being held.

That's a detached, rational, coherent way of looking at things that has very little to do with how actual people "use" the blue checkmark, and how Twitter grooms its users to use it.

The more complicated reality of how the checkmark works is that Twitter wants to have things both ways: the checkmarks promote accounts, and Twitter benefits from the increased engagement resulting from promoted accounts, and promoted accounts benefit from the exclusivity of the checkmark. But promoting accounts also puts Twitter on the hook, perceptually, for what some of those accounts say, so Twitter also has a fig leaf notion of the checkmark as simply a "verification system". But it's obviously not that.

How so? Checkmark means "this account is owned by who you think owns it" to disambiguate celebrities from parodies and identity theives/trolls.

The fact some people crave being famous enough to merit a checkmark is not a problem with checkmarks. People chase status of all kinds.

Not that I disagree with your point, but Twitter has been known to "strip" the checkmark from controversial accounts.

It's no longer for simply verifying authenticity.

If you’re referring to Milo, it was stripped for violating the terms of the checkmark, not for being controversial.

His profile claimed he was a Buzzfeed reporter IIRC. Although he was being satirical, he didn’t indicate such, and this causes problems because the whole point of the checkmark is to signal that this person is who they say they are (including any claims in their bio). Since the average random person doesn’t even know who Milo is, they may see his verified profile and attribute his inflammatory comments to Buzzfeed staff members.

Twitter has many examples of taking enforcement actions for silly reasons, but this one actually made sense given that logic.

But that's still an issue.

Twitter knew who Milo was, they'd verified his identity, and although he broke the rules, removing the checkmark told his followers one thing: "we now know anyone Twitter verifies is someone they agree with politically". This puts them on the hook for everybody who's verified.

It should be a verification only. If they didn't like what he said then they should've removed the account.

You can "should" all you want, but it's not verification only. If it was, anyone could get verified. It's endorsement, and nobody wants to endorse Milo Yiannapoulos.

According to twitter themselves, "The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic." https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/twitter-ve...

But i agree, in practice it's a "twitter endorses this account" indicator.

You and others keep repeating what others have shown is obviously not true. Whatever the stated reasons for the blue checkmark are, it is clear that, in practice, it is not just verification.

It’s like you didn’t even read my response. No, it had nothing to do with his politics and it had nothing to do with not liking what he said. It was because he was impersonating a buzzfeed reporter while wearing a verified identity marker.

We all know that twitter would recognize satire as satire if it comes from someone whose politics agree with theirs.

We in fact do not know that and Twitter routinely bans satirical liberal accounts. Twitter moderation is bad. But, of course, good moderation would also eject Milo Yiannopolous; no serious company wants that guy around. He's banned from Facebook too. These people get banned from everywhere. Is it Laura Loomer that's banned from Uber Eats?

Experiencing consequences for acting like a jerk isn't persecution.

You talk like it's one person. It's an entire community. No proof either.

>It's an entire community

No. There are millions of conservatives on facebook.

>No proof either

Same to you. What community got banned? Elaborate.

Are you just referring to far-left like Sanders supporters, rather than mainstream liberals? Which ones exactly get banned?

I'm positive Twitter would allow a mainstream-supporting liberal (i.e. someone who vocally supported Clinton or supports Buttigieg or Biden or Bloomberg) to slide on this, like any time someone would jokingly pretend they're part of Fox News. Stephen Colbert, if he had a Twitter account that was equivalent to his satirical character on his Comedy Central show, would be adored and absolutely allowed to get a nice fat bluecheck on his hypothetical Twitter.

Milo’s followers do seem to believe that, but it’s not a reasonable conclusion; lots of people who Twitter doesn’t agree with politically have blue checks.

As the person who you're replying to said, it was for verification. Milo does not work at Buzzfeed, but Milo claims to work at Buzzfeed on twitter. This resulted in the loss of the checkmark because Milo working at Buzzfeed is unverified.

My impression is that it never was. Rather, the notion that the blue-check is an indicator of celebrity was cultivated by Twitter itself. It's just not something they can come out and say directly anymore.

Aside from the incident in the linked story, fictional characters (like The Count from Sesame Street) have the blue checkmark. So it doesn't seem to me that it's there to verify "who is the owner of this account".

If you look at the leader board of HN, most of the top fifteen or so can be readily identified by their real name even if they aren't using it in their handle in some way. (I don't know about the rest of the board, having not looked in depth at every single name on it.) Most of the top fifteen-ish do seem to be using some portion of their real name in their handle.

Real names aren't required here. You can call yourself whatever you want.

In actual practice, the community does appear to care whether or not it knows who the hell you actually are. It does appear to correlate to some degree to ranking on the leader board.

You're right that there is a correlation. However, it's important to note that the community is not selecting for identifiable users by not upvoting pseudonymous users. The individuals with the highest karma are typically ones who have earned distinction in their field and are advertising themselves as such. This somewhat identifies them as authorities on certain subjects and their expertise is respected. The system is neither incentivising identified users, not punishing anonymous users. It's just rewarding certain identified ones.

I think it goes the other way. People who write good content often like to use their real name because it builds their personal brand, and don't want to harm it with shitposts. Fewer people put the effort in anonymously for no benefit. The voting audience isn't craving names.

The reason I'm aware that the top fifteen-ish names can generally be readily identified in most cases is because I post as openly female and I've gotten a lot of flak for that over years. One of the more common lousy things that has been said to me is "So don't tell people your gender. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog if you don't tell them."

So I wrote a ranty personal blog post about that at some point and went through the top names on the leader board. My point was: How do I hide my identity to hide my gender and also establish a professional reputation? This doesn't work. If you know my name, you can readily infer my gender.

I posted for years under a two letter handle that can be mistaken for a feminist handle though it wasn't intended to be any such thing and I had it six weeks before it occurred to me anyone might see it that way. It was supposed to be initials from some handle I had elsewhere and I typoed it.

I had blog posts on a personal blog explaining my handle and that it wasn't a feminist handle. After I finally hit the leader board, I became extremely uncomfortable with continuing to use that handle.

I felt there were too many eyes on me and if I needed to explain it, it wasn't a good handle under which to have that kind of visibility. So I changed to my actual first and middle name.

The first week or two, I got accused of trying to pull a fast one and trick people and ridiculous stuff like that. After that settled down, HN treated me dramatically better than it ever had under my previous handle.

Obviously, there are many confounding factors and you can't definitively prove that it's any one thing. But I think if you are establishing a relationship with a community, there is no clear distinction between "I choose to behave X way because of how I expect that to impact me." and "Other people behave X way towards me." Those things create a feedback loop and you can't completely tease out how much people find them credible because they know their name and reputation, so they upvote it and how much people make an effort to say good things.

I don't think I behave differently since changing my handle, but I certainly have a much more positive experience of the forum since changing it. So that influences my feeling that other people do care about such things.

If someone cares about your gender on HN or gives you a hard time over it or your choice to use it they're probably not worth communicating with anyway. I get your point about people maybe feeling a bit better about someone if they openly put up their real identity or link their pseudonym to a real public ID like a blog , twitter, or other account. I think that's probably just human nature but I don't think gender would come into that except maybe sexist persons who you are superior to anyway because of their choice to be an irrational person.

That's a little like telling someone of color to just ignore systemic racism.

I've been here more than ten years. I literally spent years doing all the stuff people say to do here to network, get taken seriously, etc.

It wasn't working because I got treated differently by essentially everyone due to my gender.

I was literally homeless for nearly six years and frequently going hungry while being blown off and told sexism wasn't a real problem.

You no doubt mean well. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Given that I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board, it doesn't appear to be me mishandling things. All the evidence suggests that I'm the most successful openly female member here in terms of getting accepted by the community, etc. And it has seriously sucked in a "The rampant sexism is going to help kill me" kind of way and this has been true for a great many years.

It's only in recent months that I'm beginning to get anything resembling what I wanted all along out if it. I'm quite clear this is largely due to my gender.

It's not really anything I care to discuss further. It gets me a great deal of flak to talk about all that. I've really gone to substantial pains under enormously difficult circumstance to minimize the focus on my gender and the BS I had to deal with because of it while being accused of making a big deal out of nothing, etc ad nauseum.

> It's only in recent months that I'm beginning to get anything resembling what I wanted all along out if it.

What did you want out of it?

> If you look at the leader board of HN

There's a leader board?

The footer has a link titled Lists. The leader board is the top entry on that page.

Of course, I have many intellectual convo with people under pseudonyms. But HN isn’t Twitter. And just because HN has many intellectual users who write under pseudonyms it doesn’t mean the same thing will happen in twitter!

Twitter is: 1. Used by the mainstream almost globally (HN is used by the fringe) 2. Real-time global messages in all languages 3. Used by the president

I can go on but to because of these reasons the value of tweet cannot be based on the actual conversation.

HN iS different because of the hard work of YC partners and the caliber of HN community. HN would have been occupied by thugs long time ago to do astroturfing on behalf of big companies. Here is an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383746

>> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms

> a pseudonym doesn't mean it's not a conversation not worth having

You are arguing against a point of view that you made up by taking a statement out of context. That is wholly dishonest (and/or lazily indifferent to raising more noise).

The discussion is about verified identity and what that means. Whether you think it is valuable to discuss the finer points of my family with someone (lets say... pretending to be my grandfather) via a twitter blue checkmark is irrelevant to the discussion.

well if you are like me I joined not knowing the convention in use here so just kept an alias I am familiar with. people tend to rebel from true name account rules, some of this is exactly because of twitter has become which is a tool of bullies to intimidate those they dislike or disagree with.

That works fine (somewhat) when you have moderation, and breaks down at a certain scale.

> They can add/create another Check mark for celebrities

In this case the "normal" checkmark will lose any meaning and the new "celebrity" checkmark will be what people are after and it will be gamed just the same way as the current checkmark is.

> In this case the "normal" checkmark will lose any meaning

No, it would mean 'this is a real person, and this is their real name', which is something that is currently impossoble to determine for 99% of twitter accounts today. Wether or not people want to game the 'celebrity' mark is irrelevant to that.

What would be the criteria for a "real person" checkmark then? There's still no universal, government-provided API that would allow you to check whether an ID is real, so bad actors can just cheat the system by providing fake IDs. And even if the ID problem is somehow solved, it wouldn't prevent bad actors from just paying people to create accounts under their own IDs and post their propaganda.

The current blue checkmark is being sought after because of its exclusivity, if this disappears then the attention-seekers will cling onto something different to make themselves look special and supposedly better than you.

Also, the reason the current checkmark is both exclusive and yet this fake politician was able to get one is because Twitter wants to maintain good relationships with powerful and/or popular people, and the exclusive checkmark is kind of a welcome gift. Removing the exclusivity would totally nullify its utility as a gift, which is why they keep the whole verification system in place despite being completely broken (as this incident proves yet again) and spew some BS about working on improving it just to buy themselves time.

> There's still no universal, government-provided API that would allow you to check whether an ID is real,

Colleagues of mine have created just such a system: IRMA. Short for I Reveal My Attributes.

The way it works: The government (or anyone else) can approve an attribute of yours, e.g. "over 18". You can then choose to share this verified attribute with whomever requests it.

The requestor can then see who verified that you have the requested attribute.

More info: https://privacybydesign.foundation/irma-explanation/

This is total lunacy. It has nothing to do with exclusivity and everything to do with verification.

There are established KYC processes followed by every serious company, like a bank. Yes, there is no straightforward api, but that is irrelevant.

Banning real people would actually have an effect, as you could only sell your ID once.that would massively drive up the cost of using fake account to post propaganda. People can sell out in real life for real, you can bribe real voters too ( and sometimes even officials!)

> This is total lunacy. It has nothing to do with exclusivity and everything to do with verification.

In this case they could admit the current system is broken and retire it completely (until they come up with a better solution). They don't, and just make up BS reasons to buy time because it turns out the system as it currently stands is good for them. The exclusivity (even more so now that the system is supposedly on hold, so you can't apply for verification as a layman even if you do meet the criteria like being impersonated, etc) is a feature that Twitter wants to preserve without admitting it.

> There are established KYC processes followed by every serious company, like a bank.

Banks' KYC processes operate within a way narrower set of constraints than a social network:

* They are usually limited to the local country, so the main process only have to support the most common forms of ID available in the area (edge-cases such as foreigners can go through a fallback, more manual process). A social network will on the other hand need to support every single possible form of ID.

* The bank can invest much more money into the verification process than a social network which would be lucky to make a few bucks a month per user.

* Conventional banks use physical branches to open accounts, so it raises the risk for a potential attacker as they would now need to show up in person with their fake ID and the fake document has to match their looks. This significantly raises the cost of the attack and the potential risk the attacker incurs in carrying it out. Social networks can't do this.

* Even for online banks where you can open an account online, you at least need to provide a mailing address to receive the card associated with the account so you can spend the money. So while you might indeed be able to trick an online bank into opening you an account with a fake ID, you wouldn't be able to use it until you somehow collect the card. This again significantly raises the cost of the attack and requires the attacker to be local (or have an accomplice) and take more risk than a fully online attack carried out from behind an anonymization service such as Tor.

> as you could only sell your ID once

There's a ton of people out there that have never even heard of the social network, couldn't care less about it, but would be happy to get some $$$ in exchange of something that is very unlikely to affect them directly (if they don't use the social network they most likely wouldn't even know or care about their identity's reputation on it). The potential stigma associated with loaning your account will become less of an issue if the practice becomes mainstream and everyone is doing it. In fact I'd argue it's already mainstream in the form of being an "influencer", and a lot of people, especially younger ones want to be one. In fact, people want to become one so much they apparently post fake sponsored content nowadays: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/influ...

> that would massively drive up the cost of using fake account to post propaganda

In a third-world country you could convince people to do pretty much anything for what is pocket money for us. What's the solution then? You can't just ban these countries or make their verification have less weight than let's say a US verification without getting accusations of racism/xenophobia/etc and a huge PR disaster on your hands.

I've never understood the goal of it. It feels like they claim it's to help those in the public eye that might frequently be targets of harassment or fraudulent copy-cat accounts, but AFAICT it's just a way to declare someone "popular" (or just blatantly handed out to people who have friends at Twitter).

It's just another way to separate people arbitrarily for no real reason.

There are many scammers/malicious/deceitful people that made accounts for celebrities and attempted to scam(or other bad crap) people. So there is a group of people at risk of getting impersonated and a solution is needed for this but it seems Twitter does not have it.

That's the blue checkmark

Yes the checkmark should be the solution in theory but it seems from this article that it is not implemented correctly.

FWIW, when I got my blue checkmark I had something like 6k followers; not exactly a popular account. I did it because there were some copycat accounts and I was dealing with some nasty harassment. The process was painless and it helped a whole hell of a lot in the end.

I believe very strongly in individual privacy online. The idea that I should have to identify myself online, even just to the platform, by my legal name in order to engage in discourse is entirely abhorrent. I care very much about limiting the amount of information that corporations like Twitter have about me. Without going on a tangent, I don't trust these organisations to use this kind of data responsibly and I don't trust that the world may not change in a way that will penalise people in the real world for engaging in honest debate online today. It's not hard to find examples of people who have been 'doxed' and suffered real world consequences.

Nothing OP said implied all accounts should become verified. Simply that it should be an option for everyone.

I'm responding to:

> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms..

Making verified an option for everyone is one step away from making it mandatory for everyone.

Making abortion an option for everyone's one step away from making it mandatory for everyone.

Nope, doesnt make any sense.

>why don’t they open this to everyone and people can apply with their official ID?!

Probably has something to do with there being no apparent rhyme nor reason behind their verification process nor criteria. This says to me that they simply don't know what they're doing (with it) and that "knowing someone" will continue to be the main driver for acceptance in the program.

And people look down at cowboy coding...

What would this be called... cowboy business decisions isn’t snappy enough as a term, and I’ve seen this often enough that it would be good to have a term for it!

I think the word is Cronyism

The blue checkmark is weird.

When it first came out, it was like a pseudo endorsement, then it was a prestige thing.

It doesn't seem to really do anything except stoke elitism.

It should simply mean "this name and bio has been verified" (so that other people whose name happens to be "Donald Trump" for example can't have a bio that say's their the President).

Twitter started using it for endorsements -- and taking the blue check away from controversial people with unpopular views. That makes little sense to me.

They opened it to everyone for a while and then were doing such a bad job of it that they closed it up again to stop the complaints and suggested in public that they were discontinuing verification. (Of course, that wasn't true)

You can see here https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit... that they used to accept requests but it is now "on hold"

> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms

Is your name Maram? Is there some way I can find your name?

I don't know why Twitter doesn't just outsource the verification - make a little "DNC" or "GOP" badge instead of the blue check, and let the parties verify who their candidates are. Same thing for various professional organizations, sports leagues or any other group that has a lot of people needing to be verified.

They could probably even make money off it.

They already kind of do this. Some media people are verified when someone at their company sends over a list of current employees and corresponding Twitter handles.

The USA is a free county. Party membership is not required to run for office.

Correct. If they did this it would largely tank the new social newwork in beta called the voice(https://voice.com/). Since that seems to be the main premise behind that.

Because the blue checkmark is a political tool wielded by twitter. This much is obvious.

There are services that exists that checks if a person is real or not (requiring Id, passports, real facial captures, etc). Surprised that twitter didn't even do the most basic checks.

AFAIK Twitter used to have it / released this feature. May be it is was via invitation. I remember applying for it. I think they got inundated with requests and pulled the plug

what is the definition of a public sphere?

To me twitter is just another service from a private corporation that I can choose to use or not. Is it "public sphere" because they make everything searchable and readable from the public internet?

What makes an account real on this platform? do you mean that the text is written by a human and not a bot?

> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms..

I've been thinking about this a lot after newspapers started demanding full names.

What I think I see is that full name policies correlate with more toxicity. This might sound counterintuitive at first but there is a really simple explanation:

- Smart people are careful.

- Less smart people care less.

- The same goes for people who have extremely strong opinions.

- Finally a lot of trolls can live just fine with a made up name that resembles a real one.

Full name policies optimize for trolls, dumb people and people who have very strong opinions.

If real name policies was a good idea, Facebook and the comments in online newspapers should be nice and HN, lobste.rs and Ars Technica should be really ugly and dumb.

The opposite would actually be more true.

And yet you post on HN, Twitter, and Medium without your last name.

Excellent idea. Might also help against the bot issues. If we could just turn off the visibility of non-verified accounts (or better still, make that the default) it seems misinformation would be a bit harder to spread.

But will also kill anyone's account who doesn't want to get harassed and/or lose their privacy.

I admit I've only just now looked at what it means to be verified: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit... doesn't seem like you'd necessarily have to give a real name or anything. Sure it'd mean Twitter would know more about you I guess?

For me, at the moment, I'm genuinely concerned about the rise of bots and their impact on online discourse. I'd love to see measures put in place to flag or prevent their use. You only have to look at some of the comments on a Trump/thunberg/Sanders post.

Or integrating https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu/#!/ Intro Twitters service or building their own _and turning it on my default_

Certainly doesn't have to be the verified account direction, but, something needs to be done.

Well, if everyone could get verified, what's to stop real people spreading disinformation but now, with a checkmark?

I'm all for identity verification and having a strong online identity (e.g. I really like Keybase and Estonian PKI), but being identified shouldn't mean one can be trusted.

Would all men named William Gates get to be a verified Bill Gates? There must be hundreds or more.