The blue check fiasco

Stu Pocknee

19 Dec 2024

twitter , social media

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he introduced paid "blue checks."

Previously, blue checks served a clear purpose: distinguishing credible accounts from imposters, and elevating trustworthy voices.

Predictably, offering this badge to anyone with a few dollars completely destroyed the utility of the device.

As a double whammy, Twitter also chose to amplify the tweets of those willing to pay the monthly fee.¹

Such a bad idea. 🫣

Paid attention boosting mechanisms have a name: "Advertising"².

Imagine a television channel that is 90% commercial breaks and 10% content.

Now picture the ads:

• 😵‍💫 Written by untrained, semi-literate copywriters,
• 💩 plagued by terrible production quality, and
• 🖕 deliberately designed to provoke and offend.

Would you watch that? Because that's Twitter now. 🥳🎉

Solution?

Twitter can turn this around if they want to. It's not rocket science.

1. Cultivate and reward content providers who bring value to the system.
2. Disambiguate regular paid users from high-value content providers.
3. Amplify/suppress content based on intrinsic merit, rather than creating a Dunning-Kruger honeypot.

That's a high level overview. The detail could run to pages.

But that's a job for a Twitter employee, not me. 🤷

🤕😳🥴