181–190 of 450 posts
Every aspect of telephone calls has become a total nightmare. Constant spam calls, poor audio quality, phones doing weird and random things in terms of answering calls and routing the audio to the proper device.
It is strange how telco's have managed to absolutely devalue their core product so thoroughly.
The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less! If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent…
The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the sign…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Receiver anxiety” should crawl off into the forest. It’s a youth-millennial thing that inhibits waaaay too much authentic social action. People are just too scared to be human. Just call me! I might pick up I might not. For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.
My mother had no issues calling someone but her parents were upset when she started listening to that damn rock and roll. The youth thing inhibits way too much authentic music. People are just scared to listen to the oldies. /s Différent generations have different norms and it’s not right or wrong.
Yes.
> and it’s not right or wrong.
No.
This sort of relativism of all norms, mores, morals, and ethics needs to stop. There are some cultural and social norms/mores that are better than others. We know this, because empirically some produce better outcomes than others. Mass-scale social anxiety at having to interact with another human being is NOT healthy for society, and is likely the underlying cause for a significant amount of the current social ills that are either new or increasing over time.
Tangent: > It had its quirks—You’re muted, Cathy, and so forth— There would be a simple solution: add a good ole' vu-meter. This would also help with incorrect gain, which is why they had been present on recording equipment for almost a century.
They're already there! Google Meet, for example, has them, and they also show whether the mic is muted in Meet itself or not. I can often tell that they're muted in the meeting because not only is it that their mouth is moving and no sound is coming out, but also because the little "muted" icon is perched on their tile. The same exact way they could, if they looked at the indicator.
While most communications technology has improved over the last quarter century in terms of throughput, latency, cost, etc., voice calls have become horrid. Every aspect of telephone calls has become a total nightmare. Constant spam calls, poor audio quality, phones doing weird and random things in terms of answering calls and routing the audio to the proper device. It is strange how telco's have managed to absolutel…
It all began moving to digital relatively early in the 60s, but even well into the 90s many systems were still functionally analog, with copper wire pairs carrying analog signals in a /not-metaphorical/ loop between callers.
Today we have comparatively infinitely greater capacity and capability, and there's no going back, but the "core experience" of the modern voice "app" is without a doubt a pale reflection of its original progenitor.
I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off letting scammers operating boiler rooms in India steal money from your grandparents, so they're happy to utterly destroy any utility that a phone has.
It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know. The few times (like now, unfortunately) I expect a call from an unknown number related to follow-up for in-person business, when I answer 95% or more of incoming calls are scams/spam. This is with "Spam Block" enabled, that already blocks known scam/robocall numbers AND NoMoRobo, what slips through is still the majority spam/scams.
I can't even imagine walking around with a cellular phone in 2022 without any of these tools, it's probably a hellscape just like using the web in 2022 without uBlock Origin, NoScript, and PiHole.
We can do better, and the adtech industry + the telcos making money off straight up scammers has destroyed the very fabric of technology as used for social connection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the sign…
Audio quality on cellular is widely variable. If both ends support VoLTE/HD Voice, the audio quality is actually superior to analog.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the sign…
Audio quality on cellular is widely variable. If both ends support VoLTE/HD Voice, the audio quality is actually superior to analog.