This doesn't pass the smell test in my opinion. Given that everyone who tries to create an account without a phone number has to go through the friction of getting their account locked immediately, they clearly don't care about this sort of friction. Not to mention the friction of just trying to view a tweet which has been discussed at length on HN before.

The problem is that Twitter made a big deal about verifying candidates and partnered with a third-party organization to do so. Because of that, people believe that if a candidate is verified by Twitter, they are the genuine article. There is no need for them to be suspicious because the Twitter account has been professionally vetted already.

No one forced Twitter to take on that role. The problem is Twitter claiming to verify candidates, but doing a shitty job of it. The better alternatives are (i) Twitter not claiming to verify anyone or (ii) Twitter doing a good job of verifying the identity of candidates. What they are doing is the worst possible course of action.

Untrue.

Source: my Twitter account uses a Google voice number.

It's a dark pattern, and one which only the most desperate services implement as their last desperate attempt to force users to register and login at the expense of eliminating any value the platform has to them.

Facebook has real names and the messages are just as bad if not often worse.

Extremely naive to think this will solve anything.

I fully agree with you, except on this point. With all the shitstorming, the mis-attribution of quotes, massive and massive amounts of fake accounts etc. going on, the Verified by Twitter program is a very good thing especially as it does not force you to publically post your real name.

However, it could be expanded for greater reach.

> When you get caught you get booted off the platform.

Which may not actually be a problem for most people. The thing that's stopping me from selling my Twitter account to a disinformation network is not my fear of losing access to Twitter, it's that I care about the problem of disinformation and don't want to see myself in the news for something like that.

I'm sure there are thousands of people who'd sell a simply-verified Twitter account, and they probably wouldn't even demand that much. People are already spending hours a day trying to sell their nudes, and still only making a few hundred dollars total (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/business/onlyfans-pandemi...).

For fun I just tried signing up and the process itself is confusing, sluggish, buggy, and ultimately didn’t work. It feels like it’ll need to improve very quiclkly if it’s going to capture any significant amount of Twitter users.

That sounds like a sweeping statement with little forethought when you're talking about a platform that enabled protests in dictatorial regimes.

Step back here: Fake users, sold by the thousands to give credibility and a megaphone to whoever shells out money: bad. Identity verification: A solution with many consequences to be weighed before jumping on the bandwagon.

And dictatures aside, I have no desire to give Twitter my ID or passport.

Mr. Eden there found out how to identify them quite nicely without having access to internal Twitter tech, so my guess is Twitter could have done the same, but hasn't. So I think the answer is, "not much."

yep :) I mean, both of our experiences are just anecdotal evidence pointing to each side of the argument. But in my experience, it made it easier to get onto the service.

How would destroying it prevent that again, people would just go elsewhere. You’d prevent it by Twitter thriving then clever use of algorithm suppression and shadow bans.

Conspiracy doesn’t add up.

This is worse than ever, they invest most of their effort in getting you to follow their cherry picked celeb users for your country. Then they spend the rest of their effort trying to ban you.

- Don't give us an email > account locked

- Don't give us a phone number > account locked

- Don't change your egg avatar > shadow banned

But it would effectively kill the various cat-and-mouse gaming of the entire system by spammers, scammers, and sub-nation-state adversaries.

I don't think that's a problem if your goal is disinformation or manipulation: the report this network details consisted of only 14 accounts.

> There's also a built-in compensating factor: To the extent that twitter accounts are worthless, it's easy to buy them. To the extent that twitter accounts are an important part of your identity online, people will tend to protect them. Try getting people to sell you their social security numbers.

> Right now they're closer to the "worthless" end of that spectrum. But maybe verification would change that?

I guess I'm disputing the presumption that Twitter accounts will ever be that valuable across all the members of society that the risk of loosing access to Twitter will be enough of a deterrent to any particular rando out there. Twitter's appeal seems to be mainly limited to certain slices of society (e.g. politicians, political pundits, and wannabes), and there are probably far more people outside those slices than inside them. If a rando waitress can get a verified Twitter account, and such accounts are useful for spreading disinformation, the GRU and black-hat PR agencies will probably be able to get all the accounts they'll ever need for something on the order of ~$100 a pop.

I don’t trust Twitter with my government ID.

I don’t think that’s completely true.

> easy for everyone to look at

No, it’s not if you want to stay anonymous. If you’re not logged in you can’t scroll all the way down. If you try to, it’ll stop you and ask you to log in. As you probably already know, Twitter do require you to give them your mobile number to have an account. If you try to sign up without one, they’ll instantly lock you out of your new account and force you to give them your number.

> easy for anyone to respond to

No, because you cannot reply anonymously and you need an account which is in one way or another linked to your identity. Circumventing this is very difficult for the average person.

> The power of centralization, network effects, easy UI, and low expectations for well structured posts is hard to defeat.

And it can be done while giving the users the ability to stay anonymous, but Twitter doesn’t do that. Twitter wont even let you use RSS, likely because that would prevent them from gathering as much data about you. Twitter may not be as bad as Facebook, but it’s still bad. The fact that people feel like they have to use it to gain an audience is unfortunate. I hope it starts dying out like FB and gets replaced by something that’s more open and less hostile to anonymous users.

It works for me.

I don't use Twitter (or Facebook for that matter) and I don't lose anything by not doing so.

and so, why do you believe that? I'm not being combative or snarky here. I honestly don't understand why not using Twitter isn't "practical."

This is not symmetrical.

This is their job for researchers without doing this they would be unemployed. A month of effort working on a small tight part of Twitter finding a problem and they get a large payday.

Twitter does this everyday and gets no reward other than maybe a slightly better network. They just get people thinking they do nothing.