A while ago, I was engaged in a rather heated debate on Twitter as to their proposal to open the Twitter verification process to it’s over 200 million active users, a functionality previously reserved for prominent personalities. The proponents thought while the other camp thought it would devalue the verification tick that appears next to the avatar. I belong to the camp of the proponents for the following reason.

Scarcity of a commodity does not necessarily make it valuable. Gold, diamond and other precious metals are not valuable because of their scarcity but material properties. Gold for instance is the only transparent conductor and finds application in the high-tech industry including solar panels not to add it luster that captured the attention of people for centuries. Diamond too is the hardest naturally occurring matter known to man making a perfect material for high tensile stress environment and also serves as a gem due to its refractive index. Apart from money, no other commodity has been singularly valuable due to its scarcity. Throwing that back to the verification badge, there is more to it’s scarcity that makes it “valuable”.

Economists introduced scarcity as a metric of valuability to estimate prices of commodities given their demand and supply. This made high demand less supply goods more valuable than less demand low supply goods, that’s what makes the US dollar more valuable than most world currencies. Even with this idea, there has to be a corresponding high demand for a commodity to make it valuable, I doubt if there is a high demand from the public for twitter verification badges. To expound on it, in Africa water is a rare commodity in most countries but that does not it precious, just scarce. Summing up, if a rugged man drove a Mercedes Benz S-class would that act devalue the brand? Probably not, the car itself has its properties that make it on top of its class, same to the verification badge anybody having it would not make less useful or valuable, I would still find it useful for what it was meant for, affirming the person behind a handle is indeed who is claims to be.

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