An actual human employee at Twitter vouching for someone’s existence seems far more reputable than being able to purchase a Visa gift card in a convenience store.
Verification was “this account is who it says it is”. Not “this account has $10 to spare”.
A verification badge should be something that says "this person indeed is who they claim to be" not "they can spend a couple of bucks a month" nor "we like him enough to give them a checkmark". Both are extremely unhelpful. The latter probably even more unhelpful since it is very subjective.
Verification came with moderation tweaks for high-profile accounts to combat things like brigading via mass abuse reports. That's why consistently bad behavior tended to lose the check.
Probably should've been two different flags, but it wasn't.
To me it's a bit like when your favorite fancy restaurant stops making its own bread in-house. The change itself isn't huge, and isn't all that surprising… but it's not a great sign for how the place will look in a decade.
It's more like your favorite fancy restaurant has a few dishes that suck. Instead of putting time into improving table service, fixing up the menu, maybe getting some aspects of service up to standards, they decided that every meal now comes with a back massage. That's not their core competency.
Firefox is good, but it could be great. Adding AI features aren't what will move the needle on their core competency.
The point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo.
Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.
Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious.
> Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including a good number of Holocaust ones.)
Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many prominent politicians, left and right.
The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time of war. It went from being opposed by a strong majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe 5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still function.
It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's giving people more freedom, not taking any away from anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went 'ok'.
> In interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” called JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” and concluded that Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the Epstein files.
This, mind you, is the current WH Chief of Staff. Not a disgruntled ex-staffer.
You can’t pause your audiobooks?
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