Item — HN Reader

This is absolutely necessary to stop scammers, like when the former PM of Somalia's 'verified' account was hacked, its display name was changed to "vitalik.eth", and a tweet about an ETH "giveaway" received eleven thousand likes (obviously from fake accounts).

https://imgur.com/a/LZkbms9

Also, verification by definition means you lose your verified checkmark when you change your display name, as that display name was not the one that had verified. This should have been the case ten years ago.

1 comments

When I see how many people are fooled by a display name it blows my mind. You see these people with jobs, houses, cars, etc., yet they're fooled by:

    vitalik.eth
    @lolgonnastealyourcryptobro

How do you even log in to a computer or create an online account if you don't understand the difference between a display name and a username? I just don't get it.

The display name is high contrast, bold, in a larger font and draws attention to itself. The username is in a low contrast color, smaller font, and clearly secondary and the whole layout is formatted in a way that makes it 'obvious' that the username is secondary and unimportant.

Except no one actually reads that way. People know how Twitter works. They know the display name changes. They know the username is the part after the "@", rather than being an unimportant, random string. That latter part is so well known it's become an idiom across the internet in general - people on HN will refer to dang as @dang, for example.

HN itself is designed so that all text except the comment is as difficult to read as a downvoted comment, but people here know what the username is.

People know how Twitter works.

You, I, and most people here on HN, obviously do. The evidence however seems to suggest that a lot of people on Twitter clearly don't. And that responsibility falls to a large part on Twitter as there are many obvious ways they could improve the situation.

I see no evidence that people on Twitter know less about how Twitter works than people on HN (many of whom can't even read a thread on Twitter, as they will vocally complain about it being incomprehensible to them) given that changing one's display name on Twitter has been common for years, and that we're talking about a viral meme, which implies people being in on the joke.

>And that responsibility falls to a large part on Twitter as there are many obvious ways they could improve the situation.

Sure, they could improve the situation by having verification work as intended, instead of breaking it in favor of an awkward and shameless ploy to monetize it. But that's orthogonal to the question of whether or not these mock verified accounts are fooling a lot of people, and I don't think they are.