Why Twitter's recent "verified" feature rollout was such a mess
And what you can learn from it
Twitter’s recent “verified” feature - what is it?
Twitter recently rolled out a feature that allows users to pay $8/mo to get a “verified” badge.
There have been a lot of discussions about whether this is a good feature, but let's not debate the merit of the feature here.
Paying $8/mo for extra visibility on the platform, a little more prestige, etc - some people will pay, and some won't.
At the end of the day, it's Elon’s business now, and he can charge whatever he wants for this.
Messy rollout
The problem I have is the way he rolled it out.
First of all, he decided to call this a "verified" badge.
The word *verified* used to mean that the identity of the account owner was verified.
With this new feature, it no longer meant that. It really meant... nothing.
Elon’s hypothesis was that it wouldn’t be common for people to impersonate others with this, but clearly, a lot of people were willing to pay $8 to troll or scam.
As a result, we started to have some ridiculous "verified" accounts.
A "verified" Nintendo account posting Mario giving a middle finger, a "verified" politician saying some nutty s**t, and a "verified" account of Jesus Christ.
You might have seen some of those.
So what could he have done differently?
The main thing is a slower rollout.
Instead of rolling this feature out to 100% of US iPhone users, he could've started with 1% or even 0.1%.
Then as those people played with the feature, they could adjust the verification process.
The second thing they could've done differently - they could just verify people's identities.
Airbnb does this with government IDs. Some dating apps do this with profile pics.
Either way, it's technically not that hard, and there's no reason Twitter can't do the same.
What you can learn from it
1. If you have a particular assumption, test it! Ideally on a small subset of your users.
2. Be careful with how you word things on the UI. If you say something is verified, you better make sure it is.
3. Look around and see if other apps have done something similar. Learn from them.
4. Even smart people make mistakes. Don’t be cocky!
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