The company is currently remaking its unworkable verification system — the blue check mark it awards to some high-profile accounts, an icon whose precise meaning is unclear, but that confers many privileges. Last week, Twitter removed the icon from several accounts belonging to white supremacists. Now it says it is rethinking the whole system, and looking for ways to better police its network.

It ought to consider a radical, top-to-bottom change like this: Instead of awarding blue checks to people who achieve some arbitrary level of real-world renown, the company should issue badges of status or of shame based on signals about how people actually use, or abuse, Twitter. In other words, Twitter should begin to think of itself, and its users, as a community, and it should look to the community for determining the rights of people on the platform.

Is someone making a positive contribution to the service, for example by posting well-liked content and engaging in meaningful conversations? Is an account repeatedly spreading misinformation? Is it promoting or participating in online mobs, especially mobs directed at people with fewer followers? Did it just sign up two days ago? Is it acting more like a bot than a human? Are most of its tweets anti-Semitic memes? Can the account be validated with other markers of online reputation — a Facebook account or a LinkedIn profile, for instance? And on and on.

Twitter should not just embrace such reputational guidelines, it should make them transparent and meaningful. If you’re new to Twitter, or if you’ve repeatedly flouted its community rules, your rights on the platform would be circumscribed. Perhaps you wouldn’t show up in other people’s timelines or replies or search results. The better you used the service — where “better” is determined, as much as possible, based on how others react to your account — the more status you’d earn, and the more you’d be allowed to do.

“You set up a system that encourages positive behaviors, and discourages others — so all of a sudden people see that the more trusted you are, the more reach you get,” said Anil Dash, a software executive in New York who has spent years creating and managing online communities, and who floated the broad outlines of this plan in a recent interview.