Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The first minute of every phone call is torture now

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 450 posts

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#31

Post by baxtr »

This is about local connection problems, audio device with your phone:

>Hello? … Wait, hello? Can you hear me? Okay, hold on. Ugh. Okay, okay, just a second. I have to get my earphones to connect. Damn it. Okay, never mind, I’ll just hold it up to my head. Hi, ugh, sorry about that.

I can confirm this. However, there is another class of problems, too, which aren't mentioned. Network problems. It is the year 2022 and still in many areas reception is really lousy. I need to hang up and call people again constantly.

It is not really better with FaceTime Audio or any other VOIP tech. It completely sucks! I want to connect instantly and then have a stable connection for at least 30min with crystal clear audio. Am I asking too much for 2022??

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#32

Post by fxtentacle »

logicalmonster wrote: post #2

I cannot read the article due to the paywall, but just to vent.....one painful phone pet peeve for me that's declined recently is the art of people leaving a useful voice mail. Ok, I get it. There's a few technically-challenged people that struggle with emails and texts and prefer to use their voice. I'm perfectly happy to deal with that. But they call and leave a voice mail that focuses on the wrong information. The…

I use sipgate. They transcribe every voicemail into an email with mp3 attachment. That makes it easy for me to just email people a reply to their phone call.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#33

Post by Markoff »

bigbacaloa wrote: post #4

I thought only old people still used the phone for making calls.

> I thought only old people still do phone calls for private communication.

FTFY

Just yesterday I received spam call, my only response was answering with "Yes?", then when they started to talk about something I just hang up without a word, they wasted enough of my time and energy. Private matter I communicate 100% through IM or video calls within IM, it must be very rare ocassion that my retired father calls me on the phone or that I have to call wife because she is not responding to IM.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#34

Post by Markoff »

politelemon wrote: post #13
topspin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is there are a lot of old people.

And there are more being created all the time!

Yeah, but new old people bring their habits from younger years like not using phone for making private calls.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#35

Post by hutzlibu »

pavlov wrote: post #22

Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails. It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email. It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, sh…

"It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, should I panic?!” It also removes the need to leave rambling voicemail."

Well, what is stopping your wife from also texting you, if it was something important and she did not reach you? And what would force her, to use a potential subject line?

Otherwise it is an interesting idea, but I doubt it will be a killer feature, as most would simply ignore it.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#36

Post by pocketarc »

pavlov wrote: post #22

Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails. It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email. It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, sh…

I think the problem there is that a lot of people just won't bother. Some people would just put "pick up" on that subject line, or leave it empty (surely you wouldn't make it mandatory, nobody would accept that), or any number of things.

I personally hate unscheduled calls, and I'd love it if everyone sent a text first to check if you're free for a call, and only call after you've accepted, but... that's just never gonna happen.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#37

Post by Markoff »

gary_0 wrote: post #12

Because phones aren't allowed to have bezels anymore for some reason, I'm constantly hanging up on people because there's no room for a proximity sensor to turn off the screen so my cheek presses the "hang up" button. It tries to use the front camera as a makeshift sensor, but it doesn't work very well. Recently I reacted with incredulity when the people on the other end could properly hear me through a newly-connect…

That's not problem of a bezel, but either crappy software or bad sensor, never happened to me through 11+ years of using Android phones with touch screen.

Better choose decent phone next time, mind sharing what phone causes you this trouble?

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#39

Post by y7 »

pavlov wrote: post #22

Phone calls should have a subject line, just like emails. It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. If call metadata included a subject line, software could automatically screen out calls where the subject is empty or spammy, just like with email. It would be very helpful for missed calls. “Why did my wife call twice in the last 5 minutes, did something happen, sh…

I like the idea, but it will never take off. People are fundamentally lazy when it comes to these things. Look at the surging popularity of voice messages in some circles, shifting the burden of communication fully to the receiver. Even if you had the feature, I'd wager most subject lines would stay empty, or just contain the bare minimum like "hi".

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#40

Post by codalan »

The stock Android dialer is a complete UX hellscape.

Every other time I need to dial a number, I will be randomly interrupted by some dialogue to enable a feature or to learn about X, when I'm urgently trying to make a call. It's so f-ing rude and intrusive. And it's designed to trick you into enabling shit without giving you time to think it over.

It's such a scummy thing to do, but hey, it's Google. Imagine having to make an emergency phone call, but you can't until you tap through all the prompts. Google basically broke core functionality to do this, and there's no way to disable this nonsense.

Seriously, I just want my phone to be a phone, not some feature riddled shit app that does everything (poorly).

Post reply on HN