December 19, 1999,

Hey there! You like football? Well, I’ve got a team for you!

The Cleveland Browns! Rich on history, the Cleveland Browns were founded in 1944 by businessman Arthur McBride and Paul Brown, who served as the team’s first coach. From 1946 to 1949, the Browns dominated the short-lived All-America Football Conference with four straight championships and a record of 47 wins, four losses, and three ties. In 1950, the Browns joined the NFL, and immediately won another championship, a feat the team would repeat in 1954, 1955, and 1964!

The Browns were the home of legends like Jim Brown, Otto Graham, Bobby Mitchell, Paul Warfield, Ozzie Newsome, and Leroy Kelly, among others! Truly a fantastic group of players and one reason fans love cheering on this team with its rich history of highs, lows, and everything in-between!

Are you ready to join a passionate and dedicated fanbase that bleeds orange and brown? You’re in luck! The Cleveland Browns have some of the most loyal and passionate fans in the entire league. From training camp to the Dawg Pound, Browns fans are always ready to support their guys!

Now, I know some of you may have questions, with the team that most recently called itself the Cleveland Browns having packed up and moved to Baltimore a few years back. Aren’t they the Browns? No, they’re the Baltimore Ravens, who are a completely different team who just happen to have a bunch of the same guys on it as the Browns did back in 1995. Weird, right? But they’re not the Cleveland Browns and they never were. See? Simple!

Wait, where are you going? Come back.

But hey, guess what? In a couple years’ time, you’re going to get to see Art Modell — yeah, the guy who bought the Browns back in the 1960s, that Art Modell — accept the Lombardi trophy, commemorating his franchise’s first ever Super Bowl win! How cool is that? Or, I guess it would be if Modell owned the Browns, but he doesn’t; he owns the Ravens, who, again, are not the Browns. Totally different teams, no clue why this is so confusing to people.

And yeah, sure, the Ravens are going to win six division championships and two Super Bowls since 2000. That’s cool and all, but I’m not here to tell you about the Baltimore Ravens. I’m here to tell you about the Cleveland Browns!

The Cleveland Browns! Who needs Super Bowls or consistency when you have a rich history that isn’t actually tied to the team?

Which team has had 34 different starting quarterbacks since 1999? That’s right: the Browns — that’s who! And by becoming a fan of these 1999 Browns, you’ll get the chance to see them all. I’m talking about Tim Couch, Ty Detmer, Doug Pederson, Spergon Wynn, Kelly Holcomb, Jeff Garcia, Luke McCown, Trent Dilfer, Charlie Frye, Derek Anderson, Brady Quinn, Ken Dorsey, Bruce Gradkowski, Colt McCoy, Jake Delhomme, Seneca Wallace, Brandon Weeden, Thad Lewis, Jason Campbell, Brian Hoyer, Johnny Manziel, Connor Shaw, Josh McCown, Austin Davis, Cody Kessler, Robert Griffin III, DeShone Kizer, Kevin Hogan, Baker Mayfield, Tyrod Taylor, Case Keenum, Nick Mullens, Jacoby Brissett, and Deshaun Watson!

From the two win and 14 loss low of the 1999 season to the zero win and 16 loss lower of the 2017 season, you’ll have front row seats to see one of the most consistently terrible performances by a professional sports franchise! For fun, the team will crawl into the playoffs about once per decade.

This is a fanbase you’ll be proud to be a part of! Like this guy, seen here at a 2022 game, having the time of his life!

Okay, I’ll come clean: this post isn’t actually about the Cleveland Browns, the Baltimore Ravens, or football.

It’s about [extended sigh] Twitter. (Sorry, I know I’ve been writing about Twitter quite a bit lately, but the place is truly a dumpster fire that I can’t look away from, even as I try to use it much less often.)

You know those little blue checkmarks? The ones weird people on the right have pointed to for years to smear people as being “liberal elitists?” (Most bizarrely, even when they, too, have a blue checkmark next to their names.)

In reality, having a blue checkmark next to your name just meant that at some point in the past decade or so, someone at Twitter took the time to verify your identity (which meant sending Twitter a copy of your driver’s license or another form of ID) and decided that you were notable in some small way. Yes, celebrities had these checkmarks (which were initially rolled out to prevent people from impersonating celebrities), but so did journalists, politicians, and really anyone who found themselves in the news for one reason or another. It didn’t come with additional benefits, just an acknowledgment that the person was notable in their field and that Twitter had verified their identity. That’s it.

Even so, the “blue check” boogeyman had been created, which led to millionaires and billionaires with massive amounts of power insisting that someone getting paid $200 for a Salon.com blog post was somehow the “real” elite. It was an embarrassing time — but not nearly as embarrassing as what would come next.

In comes billionaire and right-wing troll Elon Musk. After buying Twitter, he decides to revamp the verification process a bit. And by “revamp,” I mean “destroy."

Desperate to make money after grossly overpaying for Twitter, Musk decides that anyone with $8 and a credit card could get one of these (supposedly coveted) blue checkmarks. Oh, and the whole “verifying your identity” thing? Twitter under Musk was just going to skip that part. Surely, this would work out fine.

Oops! Looks like not verifying people’s identities had a very predictable consequence: impersonators. This was, you may recall, the exact thing that the checkmark system was supposed to prevent. Great work, dude. But rather than simply reimplementing the verification aspect of things, Musk decides to create an additional type of checkmark for brands: a gold checkmark!

Blue checkmarks used to mean that the user had their identity verified by Twitter, but now it just means that people were foolish enough to pay Musk $8 per month to use the site known for the running “I can’t believe this site is free” joke. People who had the blue checkmarks before still have them (for the moment, but that’s supposed to change in the near future), but when you click on their profile, you’ll see the hilariously petty description, “This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”

The whole thing has been a mess. The blue checkmark, which was created to verify the identity of notable users, now doesn’t mean that the person tweeting is actually the person they say they are; the gold checkmark is now used for brands that have had their identities verified by Twitter. And now he’s trying to sell regular people on the meaningless blue checkmark.

He’s selling you on becoming a fan of the 1999 Cleveland Browns.

tl;dr:

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