[moojd]

I agree that 'real' verification was useful, but on the other hand removing it had the nice side-effect of 'breaking the spell' of twitter's imagined importance. People take it way less seriously now which I think is positive.

[coldpie]

To provide a concrete example, Twitter was nice for getting bus service updates from whatever transit agency operates in the city I happen to be in. I used to be able to look at a bus sign and see the service agency here is called "Metro Transit", so I could search "Metro Transit" on Twitter and somewhere early in the search results a verified account would pop up with something like "Twin Cities Metro Transit" in the description. I can be almost certain that's the account I want to look at. Now that verification is gone, I have to try way harder to find the right account in the sea of conversations, spam, inactive accounts, etc etc. Or go outside Twitter to find the agency's website and dig around for their social contacts, blah blah. Nothing to do with "importance" here, I just want to know what's going on with the bus service. Twitter used to be good for that, now it's a chore.