Been meaning to write about this for a few days now, ever since Twitter actually pulled the trigger on the whole legacy checkmark thing last Thursday (that's April 20th, in case this post is still floating around in some archive years from now). I've had a checkmark on my personal account since like 2014, back when it meant a person at Twitter looked at your ID and your follower count and decided you were probably who you said you were. Not because I'm famous - I did some freelance tech writing for a site that got acquired, maybe forty posts total, and someone at Twitter must have had a slow afternoon.
Anyway. Gone now. Or it should be gone, and that's the funny part.
Elon's been tweeting for weeks that the "corrupt" legacy checkmarks were finally getting removed on the 20th, replaced by the new pay-$8-a-month Twitter Blue check that (allegedly) means nothing except you gave Twitter your credit card number. Fine, I didn't love the old system either. I always thought it was a little absurd that a random blogger from 2014 gets more institutional credibility signaling than an actual expert with four hundred followers. But at least the old system was legible. You knew roughly why someone had it, even when the bar was inconsistent.
What's happened since is dumber and more interesting than the actual policy. A pile of celebrities who very publicly said they would not, under any circumstances, pay eight dollars a month for a checkmark, Stephen King put this on the record himself, still have their checkmarks. LeBron James too. Meanwhile plenty of regular verified journalists and smaller-name people lost theirs right on schedule, exactly like Elon said would happen. The best explanation going around, and it's a decent one, is that he's just personally comping checkmarks for accounts with enough followers that removing them would look bad or annoy him. Nobody at Twitter has confirmed this in so many words, but nobody's denied it either, and the pattern kind of speaks for itself.
I don't really care about my own little checkmark, for what it's worth. It never did anything for me except occasionally make a stranger in my replies slightly less rude. But I find the whole thing sort of fascinating as a case study in what happens when you swap a rules-based system for a vibes-based one and don't tell anyone you did it. The old checkmark was bureaucratic and annoying to get (I know, I tried applying for a coworker once and got rejected twice with no stated reason) but at least it followed a process. This new version is just whatever the richest guy in the room feels like doing on a given Thursday, and everyone's supposed to pretend there's a coherent policy underneath it.
Small tangent, because I can't help it. I watched the SpaceX Starship launch that same Thursday morning, coffee in hand, half paying attention to it on my other monitor while all this checkmark stuff unfolded. There's something almost funny about that split screen. Same week, same guy: one screen showing an actual rocket tear itself apart about four minutes after liftoff (which SpaceX seemed weirdly fine with, since just clearing the tower counted as a win in their book), the other showing a social network quietly deciding which celebrities get to keep a little blue dot next to their name for reasons nobody will state out loud. Two completely different scales of consequence, same guy setting the vibes on both.
I don't have a grand theory here. I just think it's a decent little snapshot of April 2023, the kind of thing I'll have forgotten by June and be glad I wrote down now. If you're reading this later and checkmarks mean something totally different by then, well, that tracks too. Everything about this website's little corner of the internet keeps getting rebuilt every few years anyway.