Online dating is going to be a nightmare with chatbots flooding the dating sites catfishing everyone. User contrib sites like Reddit will be flooded with bots that keep the conversation going, but drop in sponsored mentions into things for revenue. I think a push for real, verifiable identities and digitally signing content may happen so people can attempt to wade through what is real and what is fake.
When I heard you could pay for the twitter checkmark, I naively assumed they would use that money to actually verify the identity of the people they gave the checkmark to and twitter was being positioned as an authority on identity verification on the internet. I think that space is ripe for the taking, and twitter was in a good spot for it, before they devalued their checkmarks into a meaningless status symbol
They have changed it up a bit, there is a new checkmark that means "company official page", another one for "notable person" for politicians and journalists, and the blue checkmark which now just means paid for twitter.
The damage has been done. Maybe it's salvageable but I think the perception of the twitter checkmark by the general public has diminished a lot very quickly. Specially by people who pay less close attention to it, and don't necessarily take note of the intricacies of the color coding. Not saying it's unfixable, but that kind of public perception is hard to build and easy to lose.
