[ericmay]

He could maybe do different colored "verified" (maybe green?) checks.

Obviously anyone with a blue check is going to be inclined to defend the exclusivity of it, but that's the problem. There are also notable people who aren't verified because they didn't jump through Twitter's hoops to become verified.

Personally I'd like to see real human verification and filtering based on "real human" and I'd pay for something like Twitter Blue if it had this. Sam Harris recently interviewed Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) and he had a very interesting and related point which was free speech should be just for real humans, bots don't have such rights. Unfortunately it seems that there is Blue Checkmark land and then spam land for the rest of us. If it kills Twitter for certain people to lose their status symbol, well, it would have killed Twitter in the long run anyway by maintaining it.