I wish it'd work like labelers and other moderation features: with users able to choose which verifiers to use. I trust the NYT as far as I can throw them when it comes to verification, for example, whereas I'd be interested in something flagging Bluesky employees or contributors to a given GitHub repository or whatever other bizarre things people would use this for like they already use labels.
> You don't trust the NYT to verify its own reporters?
What happens when those individuals stop being NYT reporters? Does @nytimes.com leave them verified? Or does that account yank the verification? And who's to say @nytimes.com is only verifying NYT reporters?
> Also, why do you say that in any circumstance? Who do you trust?
People I've met in person, for one. Bluesky has an opportunity to make the old-school web-of-trust idea mainstream, with UI around "Is this someone you've met face-to-face?" and then extending that with multiple levels of checkmarks based on how many degrees of separation exist between a given user's verified personhood and your own.
Organizations actually accountable to the general public, for another. Not some corporation, even if it's a publicly-traded one like the NYT. This is the exact sort of thing that government agencies could be implementing independently as a service to their residents (like I mentioned elsewhere). Or private-sector non-profits; Associated Press would be much more trustworthy than the NYT by that virtue alone, and yet @apnews.com ain't even verified at all, let alone given the magic "trusted verifier" powers. Why?
Barring that, I trust nobody. A blue checkmark doesn't convince me someone's "real". It just convinces me someone got a blue checkmark. I'd rather see that checkmark actually mean something that I can independently verify. Keybase had the right idea there, with the ability to add proofs to your various online accounts to assert "yes, these belong to the same person"; that would be something worthy of some checkmarks. I'd be thrilled to see little icons for "yes, there's a bidirectional connection between @foo.bsky.social and github.com/foo / reddit.com/u/foo / news.ycombinator.com/user?id=foo / etc.".
If they really wanted to verify a non-reporter as a reporter, they could give someone a salary of $1/year and then they would actually be a "reporter".
What's your concern with the NYT? Do you think they are incompetent and might verify people who are not who they say they are, or do you think that they are malicious and will deliberately verify bad actors, or something else?
The NYT account on Bluesky does nothing besides make automated posts linking to their own articles. Why would account verification even matter in that case? It is in effect just a spambot. It posts links and doesn't engage with responses.
Bluesky could always revoke NYT or any other 3rd party verification site if they abused it. The bsky community would identify bad verifications very quickly.
