[joshuaturner]

Initially I just thought they verified people working at Bluesky, which made enough sense, but this initial batch seeming so arbitrarily decided isn't a good look. It feels all too similar to the "I know someone at Twitter" verification in the SF tech community.

[FlyingSnake]

Unfortunately that’s how I’m beginning to see this too, a sign of old school nepotism and struggle to regain lost status. We’ve seen how this unfolded for Twitter.

[LastTrain]

How did that unfold on Twitter? I thought they did it better than anybody before the takeover but maybe I’m missing something.

[xnorswap]

Even before the takeover accounts could be "unverified", which makes a mockery of the concept of verification.

Verification should always have been "This is who they say they are", not an endorsement.

The "algorithm" boosting tweets from verified accounts also showed it was an endorsement rather than verification.

When people lost verification for being distasteful, it reinforced the blue checkmark as being an endorsement.

The takeover sold-out the "value" build up from blue checkmarks by just straight up selling them. It explicitly made the platform "Pay for reach".

[dfxm12]

Even before the takeover accounts could be "unverified", which makes a mockery of the concept of verification.

Why? Accounts can be sold/hacked, and there is a lot of that on social media. A verified account may even be a higher value target for some of the reasons you're bringing up, like algorithm boosts, verifications being considered an endorsement. In either case, unverification not only makes sense, but should be expected.

[xnorswap]

I knew a pedant would get me on that.

I'm talking about people, who are still verifiably the same people, becoming unverified.

Yes, where accounts have changed hands, or changed identity, they should be unverified.

That's actually one of the cases where twitter did not un-verify. Accounts "earned" the blue-check then changed identity to something else, appearing "verified" as that new identity.

[dfxm12]

If that's what you were talking about, you should have said that. Accounts are not people. This is not pedantry (and calling me names doesn't prove anything, either).

[spacebanana7]

If I’m able to register a company with a name that matches your username, should I be able to get a verified account with the handle “real_xnorswap”?

Such things could be ripe for abuse. Although to be fair a social media platform might be able to push some of the blame onto the corporate registries.

[xnorswap]

If you're not claiming to be me, then I can't see why you shouldn't be able to use the name xnorswap, especially if that's your company name. I don't own the name, and if you have your own presence under that name, I can't see the issue.

Even trademarks only cover a company's particular domain. See the long history of Apple Corps vs Apple Computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

In my view this is how verification ought to work:

- A user writes a bio / about field

- A trust provider verifies that bio is factual

- Any change to that bio will cause their bio to become unverified until it can be re-verified. ( The bio change can be held back until verification can complete. )

- An appeals process exists

How "trust providers" are established without leading to excess centralisation is a difficult problem. This is especially true given that like moderation, it's an expensive thing to do.

There is the possibility of trust-chains such as the way Lobsters works, but there's a exposed to the masses I suspect that people just mass-verify everything without any checking.

In reality you'd be left with one or two central pillars that people trust, and everything else which people don't.

There's also the danger that too much verification leaves new users in the cold. If 90% of genuine users are "verified", then a brand new user doesn't have much chance of making it through filters to become known enough to hope for verification, and will find themselves ignored and effectively locked out. ( This is already the case for some platforms where you're effectively required to give your phone number else end up in the "probably a bot" pile and de-facto shadow-banned. )

[noirscape]

There's a pretty good retrospective written up on this blog[0].

In short: originally the purpose was nothing more "this account belongs to the person they claim to be and we've directly verified this with them". Unfortunately, people habitually misinterpreted the checkmark as not just being verification but also a tacit endorsement of the account by Twitter the company. Which isn't great when you get a high profile controversial event and it's lead organizer has a verified Twitter account.

After that, they appended an "in good standing" qualifier, and it quickly devolved into a "you know a person who knows a person who knows a person" situation since they also announced a public pause of the program. (Notably, the ID check, while it existed, was pretty much abandoned. Twitter at some point began demanding ID scans to report things to their support, but that obviously never actually translated to a blue check.)

Musk's version of it is hilariously simplistic, but also robs it of any and all value: just pay money for it and you'll get it. It works in the sense that it confirms the poster has a bank account (although this probably doesn't confirm much in and of itself), but any and all value of said verification is minimal because any old hack/scammer can do that.

Verification is a difficult system to get right and people have all sorts of pre-baked in ideas on how it should work versus how it actually works and the use of a checkmark played a part into how Twitters version was perceived over the years. (As well as Twitters own unreliability in being consistent about what it means.)

[0]: https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2022/11/01/the-failure-of-acco...

[6510]

It does prevent one from creating thousands such accounts per minute.

[whywhywhywhy]

Huge swathe of accounts who got in early and had friends at Twitter got verified and had priority standing in algorithms and moderator reports just based on that not on the merit of their posts.

Oh you could also pay Twitter employees $20K under the table to be verified too.

[FlyingSnake]

It started well with good intentions and the initial rollout solved the problem. It then turned into a status symbol and hidden caste system. When Elon took over and turned it into a game, all cred was lost.

[azernik]

It was a "hidden caste system" with no real consequences for people's interaction with the platform. I have approximately zero sympathy with the "anti-bluecheck" resentments that Musk tapped into.

[IMTDb]

When Elon took over; the rules were clearly laid out: buy your checkmark for $7/month (not sure of the price). Pay and you get it; stop paying and you loose it. Everybody knows exactly what it means.

Before that it was: "Someone will give you the checkmark if they like what you say enough and/or if you are deemed 'popular enough' according to an obscure committee; likely a combination of both. But there is a certain threshold above which it does not matter what you way, and you will always be verified". You could loose your checkmark on the whim of some dude who got his latte order wrong in the morning. No one was ever given the rulebook. In fact there was no rulebook. Checkmark just meant "I went to a bar with a Twitter employee and we agreed on a lot of things".

The same thing will happen to Bluesky. The system is akin to how CA and SSL does work with a critical difference. To get an SSL certificate, there is a clear step-by-step guide on how to get it. And after it has been granted it isn't revoked regardless of wether DigiCert agrees with the content of your website.

[notwhereyouare]

>When Elon took over; the rules were clearly laid out: buy your checkmark for $7/month (not sure of the price). Pay and you get it; stop paying and you loose it. Everybody knows exactly what it means.

except then he was also randomly giving out checkmarks to people who didn't want them and specifically told him to remove them

[idiotsecant]

Do you have a better proposal for preventing spam and scam accounts from impersonating users that a lot of people pay attention to?

[FlyingSnake]

In my humble opinion: The basic premise is itself is wrong. Why should BlueSky (or X or Mastodon) should be the sole arbitrator of truth? Who are these prophets that we need to preserve the sanctity of their messages?

If I want to hear what a journalist has to say, I would go to their official website like NYT or Tagesspeigel and read it there. Should we be interested in what Kim Sang yun or Sebastian Mustermann has said few minutes ago?

The problem of spam and impersonation goes way beyond Blue Checks.

[brookst]

Are you saying that the problems of spam and impersonation are so insurmountable that there’s no point trying to mitigate them?

[pc86]

They definitely did not say that and what is this constant need for people on the internet to respond to someone saying "maybe this isn't the right way to do something" with "Oh well then you're saying that something can't be done at all and it's pointless and why even try!!!11"

[maxerickson]

In this case, they aren't the sole arbiter. They do happen to be the one that their client is advertising, but they can add others.

You are borderline arguing that information is bad (because that's all a verification is).

[FlyingSnake]

> You are borderline arguing that information is bad

Your words not mine.

I questioned why sites like X or BlueSky or Reddit can be sole in charge of who is "verified" and Real™. We can listen to what the Journalists, UN officials etc have to say on their own media websites, right?

Too much news is bad for us anyway [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054

[idiotsecant]

This is some grade A navelgazing. This is an actual, real, practical problem that decreases the signal to noise ratio in these communities. Spammers pretend to be popular people and use it to scam, steal, and otherwise take advantage of people. It's a good thing to reduce that and makes the service better for everyone.

[k__]

Why should BlueSky (or X or Mastodon) should be the sole arbitrator of truth?

Are they the sole arbitrator if they simply use a DNS record?

That's the same tech used to verify their official website.

[steveklabnik]

Some employees aren't even verified!

I hear you. I haven't investigated every account that got the badge, but it feels to me like they picked people who are both technical and engaged with the protocol, so not entirely arbitrary. That naturally will have some correlation with "I know someone at bsky". I know I've seen accounts that I think are cooler than I am who didn't get verified yet! I'm sure they'll be expanding soon, which will dilute this sort of association.

[joshuaturner]

I can empathize with their position; I know this is something the community, especially the newer users coming from the continued rapid degradation of Twitter, are asking for.

The concept of verification and Bluesky's original mission of decentralization are two very at-odds concepts, and I think they've bridged that pretty well and left a lot of options for themselves to expand it in the future. I'm just worried about the very visible parallels to the Twitter ecosystem emerging.

My opinions on this will change if I join the verified elite, in case any bsky employees are in the thread.

[3np]

> The concept of verification and Bluesky's original mission of decentralization are two very at-odds concepts,

Not necessarily. Consider the PGP Web-of-Trust model. Centralization of trust is choice, nothing inherent in verification as such.

[vehemenz]

An imperfect system is still better than nothing. Look what happened to Twitter with the removal of its verification (before feckless Musk had driven it fully into the ground).