Was it a mistake for Twitter to include blue checkmarks?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Absolutely.

At the very minimum Twitter should've held to the initial reasoning behind them, which was to indicate celebrities or other people of interest's actual accounts and allow them to be deafferented from parody accounts or imitators. The problem is a bunch of hardly notable people then started pursuing them like a badge of honor, and Twitter gave them out way too easily, and soon all sorts of third-rate journalists and even bloggers or even people who aren't notable for anything besides posting on Twitter a lot had them and it went to their heads. And now today we have a situation where a blue checkmark just as often as differentiating from parody actually is just a way of saying "this person is a truly insufferable beyond words windbag for which being waterboarded would be a more pleasurable experience than reading their tweets for five minutes but we've decided they're notable and worthy of attention anyway for some reason so they're going to get tons of it"...and then that happens and they can't just be ignored either.

Actually the real minimum Twitter could do about them is actually enforce their ToS which prohibits blue checkmarks from "protecting" their accounts and limiting access, so they can't engage in the standard "Post absolutely ridiculous and absurd hot take, get ratioed and called out for it by all corners of Twitter, protect tweets to avoid the heat for now" pattern.

[KoopaDaQuick 🇵🇸]

I wouldn't call it a "mistake" as verification badges are actually a very good idea, the problem is that they've gone from a way for people to verify that they're actually the semi-famous person they claim to be to a way to distinguish the #woke journalists from the people whose politics aren't annoying and pretentious.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Twitter was a mistake

[beesley]

Twitter does hold to the original logic. Yes a lot of randos have blue ticks, but they could potentially be impersonated as well. You have a point in that having a blue tick gives them legitimacy, but you could blame their employers or readers just as much. I suggest if you don't like what you see... you avoid using Twitter in that way? Presumably you see these things because you follow them or people that engage with their content, or you seek it out.