Elon Recreates The Lords & Peasants Bluecheck System He Hated, But Makes Sure It’s Even Dumber

There is something amazingly humorous in watching Elon Musk work his way ass-backwards and blindly to recreating (but much worse) the mostly- systems he destroyed blindly upon taking over Twitter.

As we’ve been pointing out since basically day one, Musk never understood the whole verification concept. Early on, before he’d even taken over the company, Elon had suggested that the way forward should be that all users on the platform should be “verified” and that this would magically stop spam and bots (it would not).

Then, when he took over the platform, he got so confused by verification as a tool to protect well-known users, combined with the fact that some people viewed those users as influential, that he assumed it was the bluecheck itself that had value. Thus, he took it away from all the actual well-known users and allowed his dumbest fans to pay him a monthly subscription to have the bluecheck… that no longer had any value.

Indeed, it started to accumulate negative value as it was widely abused by scammers. Then, making matters worse, Elon futzed with the algorithm to make it so that if a tweet got a lot of replies, those with bluechecks (i.e., gullible Musk fans who were paying) got their replies at the top of the list. In practice this meant two things: (1) the very spammers and scammers Musk insisted he was getting rid of quickly started using this to their advantage, increasing the flood of spam, and (2) reading replies on ExTwitter became almost entirely useless as they were filled with garbage, and it was impossible to find anything of value.

Anyway, about a week ago, Musk announced that anyone with over 2500 paying followers would be gifted “Premium features” for free. This basically means that any decently large account would be getting a blue check for free.

This is, effectively, an admission that most actual influential and widely followed accounts weren’t seeing any value on the platform and weren’t paying for “X Premium” or whatever it’s called these days.

But, it also seems like an acknowledgement that Elon got the value equation totally backwards here. He thought that the value came from the blue check. But that was wrong. The value came from the people who were well known, who lots of people wanted to follow. And Musk inverted that, by making it harder to hear from the people folks wanted to hear from, and instead, flooded the system with fucking fools.

So, now, the system is even dumber. Basically any site with a decently large following (somewhere between 80k and 120k or so…) seemed to end up with a bluecheck back on their account. Even as many of them don’t want it (which seems silly: if you don’t want it, just stop using the site).

Users who got it received a notice that they were getting it for being “an influential member of the community.”

Remember, being “an influential member of the community” was the original reason that old Twitter gave users for verifying them in the first place. And which Elon raged against as inherently unfair.

I’m curious what happened to this version of Elon:

That’s Elon saying:

Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.

Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.

So… now we’re right back to there being a “lords and peasants” solution. Peasants can pay (often more than $8/month) to get a bluecheck, but anyone even remotely noteworthy gets it for free by way of having enough dimwit gullible suckers who did pay follow them.

This still undermines the only actual purpose of a verification system: to make sure people aren’t impersonating well-known users. There is no actual verification for anyone in this system. You have a bad form of verification (“do you have access to a credit card?”) for gullible followers, and then an even worse form of verification (“are you followed by a bunch of gullible suckers with access to a credit card?”) for everyone else.

That’s not verification. It’s also not valuable. It’s just designed to hide Musk’s incompetence in managing the platform, while (once again) undermining the whole “pay me for this site I’m making worse day by day” business model that Musk keeps pushing.