Ah yes, It has a blue checkmark. We can safely disregard good ideas, strong philosophy, and objective reasoning. Humanity is screwed if your delineation is whether or not someone wanted to make their profile look stronger. Now if they don't have a blue checkmark, we can safely assume whatever is said by that profile is gospel so long as it aligns itself with my ideological positions. It is wonderful. We don't even need to think for ourselves anymore when we have thought-leaders thinking for us.
The iron law of social media is that those paying for attention (soon, Twitter will prioritise the tweets of those who pay the $8, they claim) are less worthy of attention that those who get it organically. Like, there'll probably be exceptions at the edges, but it's likely a decent filtering heuristic.
Even dating/hookup sites, who pioneered this mechanic, have backed away from it somewhat; Grindr allows people to pay for temporary boosts up the top of the grid, for instance, but it _rations_ this; there's a cooldown once a user does it.
Humanity is screwed if your delineation is whether or not someone wanted to make their profile look stronger.
That's why it's an anti-recommendation signal. If a user needs to spend $8 or $11 a month to look like they have a strong profile then they're confirming that they don't have a strong profile. If they did they wouldn't need to boost it.
Now if they don't have a blue checkmark, we can safely assume whatever is said by that profile is gospel!
Nope. If a user doesn't have a checkmark then there is no signal, not the opposite signal. You can't assume they're a strong poster or a weak poster; you have to actually read their posts and figure it out from their content.
Shouldn't the content quality be the delineating factor?
Who gives a shit if they want to add some authenticity? It showing they are putting some money into their presence. That means the opposite of what op is trying to get across in 250 words or less.
Our civilization has gotten too far from reason. Too many people disregard viewpoints simply because of who makes them, which "side" they are on, and other frivolous things.
Shouldn't the content quality be the delineating factor?
No, because that's not what Twitter Blue subscribers want. They want to artificially boost their posts regardless of the quality. If they need to do that it's almost certainly a bad sign. If you want content to be the delineating factor then you need to let the content speak for itself.
I view Twitter Blue in a very similar way to paying for ads in Google. Yeah, they move you to the top of the SERPS page, but I'm not going to rely on that to decide what the best link for me to click on is.
*I view Twitter Blue in a very similar way to paying for ads in Google
As is your choice and right as a consumer of content.
Ads do have a role, however. The right product can solve a lot of problems, and you may not discover that product were it not for the ad.
Don't get me wrong, Google is beset with ads and they often get in the way of finding what it is you are seeking. But not always.
I don't personally see any issue with people wanting to boost visibility, especially on a platform with almost half a billion users. That's a lot of noise to get through and even if your content is good, you're still competing with no guarantee of a pay off.
Nobody has time to read everything. Blocking Twitter blue subscribers is a quick way to weed out bad content. It basically allows me to use the algorithm organically, while weeding out content that is artificially boosted.
That's fair, I should have elaborated a bit more on that point in my post. My thinking is that I need to use principles that will optimise the signal-to-noise ratio. In other words, just consuming everything in my feed is not optimal. One effective way to optimise the signal-to-noise ratio is to block Twitter Blue accounts.
I am not saying that all content from Twitter Blue accounts is bad (I am sure a lot of it is very good), but that I - on average - will get better content in my feed from not having any Twitter Blue accounts showing up.
When looking something up in a certain search engine which shall not be named, I never look at the top-most advertised links. This has multiple reasons, but probably the most important one is: a search engine is interested in showing me content that I wouldn't be shown normally as a result to earn money. So I ignore these and look towards the later links, or (preferred) I block them from showing up.
Do you feel this is juvenile? If not, can you clearly differentiate? Just to be clear, we're talking about blocking people that artificially boost their reach. In my view, these boosted messages will at best bring you "worse" content (in the sense that it isn't visible due to the content of the message, but due to the wallet of the author), at worst you'll get content from malicious actors (state actors etc.) washed to look like grass-roots opinions.
I've noticed that twitter blue subscribers often are high up in the list of replies, and are often (but not always) lower quality. I've gotten in the habit of blocking Twitter blue subscribers as well, and it has improved the quality of the application for me. I should take some time out to make a plug in automatically block them.
I don't see how using tools to make a user experience better for myself is juvenile.
