[humanpotato]

Yes. Obviously.

A more insightful question is "were they ever cool?" It's hard to think of any company or figure, before or after the Twitter purchase, where them gaining a blue check made them "cool", or even fractionally moreso.

[prepend]

Twitter could have attempted a true reputation system that would help me (I want to see people who people I follow have endorsed, that would be useful).

Instead they did something that was kind of confusing and not helpful. Twitter didn’t have a systematic way of being “significant” so it would just kind of be haphazardly applied.

Lebron James is famous, but he is known already so doesn’t need a blue check. (Just have an ama verification image somewhere in profile) It was all the other seemingly random people that had blue check marks that meant nothing to me.

[kevinmchugh]

The check mark was useful for differentiating LeBron from fake, parody LeBron accounts. I don't click through to every account retweeted onto my feed, so having a piece of UI on every tweet makes it easy to see that it's not a parody. That's very useful.

Subreddits often attach flair to notable posters.

[prepend]

I never found it useful though as I have other means for authenticating accounts.

I would unfollow people who are dumb enough to retweet a fake lebron so it’s very unlikely fake lebron would end up in my feed.

[kevinmchugh]

The people I follow were not fooled, they were laughing at parody accounts. The risk is that 1) I'm not verifying every account that gets retweeted onto my feed and 2) I have an imperfect overlap of knowledge with the people I follow. So a subtle parody could go right over my head.

[prepend]

I agree and don’t verify every account in my feed, just the ones I follow.

But I don’t need to verify every account. I’m not making life or death decisions so if someone retweets real lebron or fake lebron I don’t care.

It’s definitely likely that subtle parodies go over my head frequently.