>You pay a certain amount of money, for say, 10,000 followers and expand your network. You didn’t have to post good content or had to wait for a few years. You solved both the problems by throwing money at the problem.

>With this expanded network, you apply to Twitter to verify your profile and Twitter obliges and marks your profile as verified and gives you the verified checkmark. Being a verified user, the possibilities are now endless

This whole blog is just based in a fictional world unconnected to reality

Having a blue check mark didn't give anybody anything except pride and letting people know it was the person with the name. It didn't bring you followers or fame. Having a bunch of bot followers isn't going to get you verified either.

ex-Twitter engineer here. +1 to this, having a bunch of bot followers wouldn't get you verified. There are internal metrics that show what % of followers are likely bots and other metrics are taken into consideration.

Having a check mark does promote your tweets in various ways, though. It’s definitely a force multiplier.

Replies from verified accounts would show up higher in the replies list, and replies dunking on bad tweets was (is?) a good way to get a bunch of like minded followers. See every grifter in 2016 replying to every one of Trump’s tweets for clout.

The character limit works soooooo well that people spin up endless chain of replies or post plain old screenshots of text just to express an opinion.

So now:

- Elon is running around handing out free blue checkmarks to people he's afraid if losing on the platform (pretending he's doing it as a joke). And this resulted in predictable backlash from those people

- Removal of legacy verification also removed verification from news agencies, alongside with "state-sponsored" labels. Russian propagandists have already thanked Elon for that

It's all fine

a lot of opinions yet twitter is ... fine for me? It's a little faster but other than that it has been the same dumb RSS replacement as before. I agree that long tweets are a bad idea and i tend to skip those. It's also fine if they want to charge people for verifying their identity and remove impersonators, after all a lot of banks do that.

> The user would have to submit some sort of a government issued ID to verify that they are who they claim to be.

I don’t trust Twitter with my government ID.

An anecdote: I never used Twitter but this year I created an account to “vote” for Elon. He isn’t a saint for sure but I believe our world needs him.

Feel free to downvote if I “upsetted” you.

In a good way.

Elon unknowingly funded migration of people to mastodon and other federated social media when he brought Twitter. This is just another step on that long term plan.