So Twitter apparently started rolling out the new "Blue" checkmark thing yesterday on iOS, $7.99 a month, and I spent about twenty minutes last night just staring at the subscribe screen trying to decide if I was going to be the kind of person who pays for a checkmark. I did not pay for a checkmark. But I got weirdly close, and I think that says more about where things are right now than any hot take about Elon Musk's ownership plans would.
Here's the thing that's bugging me. For years the blue check meant something specific and kind of boring: somebody at Twitter had looked at your account and confirmed you were who you said you were. Journalists, politicians, that one weather guy in Ohio who has 400k followers for reasons nobody can explain. It was a verification badge, not a status symbol, even though everyone treated it like one anyway. Now it's a subscription tier. Same blue, same shape, completely different meaning, and for a few days at least both kinds are going to be sitting right next to each other in people's bios with no way to tell them apart at a glance. My buddy Dev texted me a screenshot last night of some rando account with a blue check posting nonsense, asking if it was a parody or just a guy who paid eight dollars, and honestly neither of us could tell. That's the whole problem in one screenshot.
I don't think this is some grand ideological crisis, to be clear. It's eight bucks a month. But I've been doing this blog since November 2011 and if there's one thing eleven years of writing on the internet teaches you, it's that trust signals are fragile and once you dilute one you don't really get it back. The checkmark worked because it was scarce and it was earned (or at least gatekept, which isn't quite the same thing but functioned similarly). Turn it into a subscription add-on and it stops doing the one job it had. People are going to keep calling it "verified" out of habit for a while even after it stops verifying anything, and that lag is exactly where the impersonation problems are going to live.
And it's not like this is happening in a vacuum. Same week, Meta announced it's cutting something like 11,000 jobs, which is the first mass layoff in the company's eighteen-year history as far as I know, and Zuckerberg's memo apparently opens by saying he takes full responsibility for over-hiring during the pandemic bump. I don't have anything especially clever to say about that except that it's a genuinely strange feeling to watch two of the biggest social platforms on earth go through this kind of upheaval in the same seven-day stretch. One is restructuring its whole trust and identity layer on a whim, the other just shed a chunk of its workforce roughly the size of a small town. Neither of those things is normal, and normally you'd get one story like that a year, not two in a week.
I'll admit part of my hesitation on the $7.99 thing is just cheapness. I already pay for too many monthly things, my podcast app, cloud storage I don't fully use, a VPN I forget exists until the renewal email shows up. Adding "checkmark" to that list felt like it'd tip me into some category of person I don't want to be, the guy who pays a subscription fee for the appearance of being a somebody on a website. My blog doesn't even have comments turned on this month because I got tired of moderating spam, so the idea of me caring about a badge on a different platform entirely is a little funny when I think about it.
Anyway. I'm curious how this actually shakes out once it's live everywhere and not just iOS, because right now it feels like a rollout in the middle of a much bigger story that hasn't finished happening yet. There's a lot of noise this week and not a lot of it feels settled. I'll probably write about the Meta layoffs properly once there's more detail on severance and timelines, since a couple people I follow on here have friends affected and I'd rather get specifics than speculate. For now I'm just watching my timeline fill up with little blue marks that don't mean what they used to and trying to decide if that bothers me as much as I think it does.