At least in my circles blue check marks were mocked because they became a symbol of endorsement of certain viewpoints by Twitter rather than a symbol of verified identity.

And yet the process to grant bluecheck was to literally check personal id, and grant it to whoever had media presence. For years, you could request verification, send a couple of links citing you, provide a government-issued ID and that was it.

Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.

That’s just straight up a total lie. Everyone who was self-aware in 2017 or is able to use Google can confirm that. I don’t even understand what is the point of such blatant gaslighting.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/twitt...

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/15/twitter-v...

Yeah, I overstated that. It's not relevant to my main point, by I'll give you that.

Funny. I see it differently. I pay for the blue check because it adds legitimacy. If I'm replying and having conversations with people with similar blue checks then I know I'm talking to real humans not hiding behind fake usernames. Also, any threats or anything from bad actors could otherwise be tracked based on payment method.

When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames? What do you think underlies this feeling you seem to have?

EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.

> When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames?

On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.

The accounts of companies, government agencies and people linked to those two have a different color of check or a special icon. This seems like an actual improvement on everyone being blue to me.

I acknowledge they're shipping changes to the frontend - some of which are not bad at all - but it sounds surreal to me that we keep talking about UI changes as if they were major features, and pretend twitter circles aren't broken, that notifications are as in near real time as they were, etc. There were major losses of service quality in basically everything backend related, and no amount of frontend tweaking can compensate that.