Twitter, It’s Time to End Your Anything-Goes Paradise
“You set up a system that encourages positive behaviors, and discourages others — so all of a sudden people see
that the more trusted you are, the more reach you get,” said Anil Dash, a software executive in New York who has spent years creating and managing online communities, and who floated the broad outlines of this plan in a recent interview.
The blue check system started out as a simple way to verify a person’s identity — a kind of trademark for ensuring
that a tweet from an account with the name Donald J. Trump had come from the real Donald J. Trump
The company is currently remaking its unworkable verification system — the blue check mark it awards to
some high-profile accounts, an icon whose precise meaning is unclear, but that confers many privileges.
But as you gained trust and rights on the network, your check mark would change color — it’d turn blue, then green, then perhaps gold.
The better you used the service — where “better” is determined, as much as possible, based on how
others react to your account — the more status you’d earn, and the more you’d be allowed to do.
Dash suggested that instead of a blue check mark, everyone might start out with, say, a gray one.
