It's embarrassing enough to be an active user on a platform owned by the cringiest person online. People will now also think you're paying for the privilege.
Most blue checks I've encountered are just intentionally engaging in bad faith discourse to farm engagement for the payout, so being able to identify the accounts that can do this is a positive in my book. I tend to block most of blue checkmark accounts reflexively.
If anyone is as confused as I was and wondering why someone would get a blue check to begin with if they don't want it:
> The change comes shortly after X unexpectedly began adding blue checks to the accounts of “influential” users with at least 2,500 followers who pay for a premium subscription. While Elon Musk suggested that change was meant to be a perk, some of his critics — including formerly verified users — were less than pleased with the blue badge appearing on their accounts, lest others suspect them of actually paying for a subscription.
Apparently you can get them from being followed by enough checks.
I think paying for twitter (or any social media for that matter) would be frowned upon even before Elon bought it. At least by normal people who don't use it for business.
I disagree. I think it’s specifically because of Elon now. Blue lets you post really really long tweets. Thats potentially interesting and useful. But Elon has abused and changed and reverted what “verified” and “blue” means so many times that I think that’s where the objection to involuntary signaling comes from. Even this change is specious and not about the product… it’s about his continuing sad attempts to increase revenue, and perceived usage levels.
> Blue lets you post really really long tweets. Thats potentially interesting and useful
You mean degraded the user experience. People used to split their long-form thoughts out into a series of tweets ("a thread 1/8 -->") which I could read by simply scrolling down.
Now they still do this, but half of the tweets are too long to fit above the fold. I'll get to tweet #3 and have to click into it to read the text. Then scroll to tweet 4 and do it again. By the time I'm done I have to click back half a dozen times to return to my feed.
That or they post an essay in one tweet which is just terrible. Bad font, hard to read. And besides, I didn't come to Twitter to read long-form content. Make it concise.
It's amazing how one little change can ruin the UX. It's almost as if Elon didn't think through the downstream impact of his change, or why tweet limits existed in the first place.
I still remember the early days of this pay for blue check system when Biden was talking about man parts while being indistinguishable from the real account
