Phone Numbers are Dead

Voice mails are recorded audio. Most robocalls would leave a blank voicemail with no audio that would be deleted before it appeared on your phone. For any voicemails that do have content, they could be extremely effectively spam filtered using modern techniques. Those too would never get to your inbox.

I wish google voice still did this. For a while, I had it jiggered such that google voice handled my voicemail and basically any time anyone left me a voice mail I got a text (or maybe something inside the app so it didn’t go over sms) with googles best guess at what they said.

This was profoundly useful and I miss it dearly.

iPhones just do this by default if your carrier supports it. Here is what it looks like.

God damn iphones and being better in many ways.

No. Pretty much any VoIP/Asterisk system can set it to any arbitrary setting they want.

Eh, it comes down to both urgency and complexity of what I need to communicate in my case.

I have gotten into very long text/email threads over the years where, for various reasons, an actual quick phone call would’ve done a better job because, somehow, for whatever reason, there is something that is “lost in the translation” in a text or email that for whatever reason, a quick phone call would resolve. Maybe it’s a human psychology thing where we’re better at processing verbal communication with all the nuance it entails vs. textual communication.

Then again, when I do come across these sorts of situations, I’d probably text or email the person I wanted to contact first and, if that didn’t seem to get the message across, I’d respond with a “can I just call you?” message.

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As someone who works in the telecom-adjacent industry, let me be the first to say AAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA snort AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHAAHAHAHAHA

gasp

AHAHAHAHHHHAHHA.

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My authentication system is that all calls are blocked except for a handful of whitelisted phone numbers.

Good day!

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I saw a Tweet the other day with an intriguing suggestion. In order to reply to someone’s tweet who does not follow you, your Twitter account must be verified with a phone number. Why? To prevent trolls and shitlords who go after people on Twitter, and even after getting blocked create new accounts to continue their harassment. Will this negate all abusive behavior on Twitter and will some people find a way around it? Absolutely, but it’s a far cry better than the “we’ve tried absolutely nothing and we’re all out of ideas” that Twitter has been doing since forever.

70 percent of Americans don’t answer their phones when they don’t recognize the incoming number.

There should be a blanket ban on automated calls being sent out. Most automated customer services still function because they only rely on calls made to the computer. If you absolutely need to make mass calls out to strangers, tough shit. Reduce unemploymemt by hiring human callers.

Problem is that to my understanding, that besides being scams by organized crime, the calls themselves are already illegal but mostly originate from Russia, China, and Africa where they don’t give a single fuck about US law and are out of reach of US enforcement. The issue is that US Telecoms aren’t doing much to address it vis a vis the victimization, annoyance and inconvenience of the end user.

I’ve been using the call screening feature built into to Google Assitant for a few months now, and I think that maybe two calls out of hundreds have been legit.

I’d say calling someone on the phone without previously scheduling it or sending an email/text/IM/DM is a gross breach of modern etiquette.

It’s like chewing with your mouth open or sneezing without covering your mouth.

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Do your parents never call you?

They seem to be odd exceptions to this rule.

Otherwise, yeah, it’s odd, however I’d really not characterize it that way unless it’s a call that could have been a text. In the modern era, calls from people who aren’t my parents are always emergencies that demand my immediate attention.

“The server is actively down and we’re losing money”
“This person you know is in the hospital due to an injury”
“Someone died”
“Your house has been robbed”

All of those aren’t “a gross breach of modern etiquette”. Those are what phone calls are for. Using it for something other than something that demands my immediate attention to the exclusion of all else. Yeah.

Minus the first, etiquette doesn’t play into the others as they are extreme circumstances which, hopefully, happen infrequently.

Server is a debatable one but if protocol is to call from it being down, then that is effectively having it previously scheduled, just without a set time or date.