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.