Improving first impressions on Signal

Signal's message requests is a major selling point for me.

I recently created a Signal account after having a bad experience in which someone used my phone number to harass me with SMS/calls (every time, from a different VOIP number). It's frustrating that, even in this era, there is no good way to filter out malicious actors from SMS/call.

P.S. You can sign up with Signal via a VOIP number to avoid sharing your real phone number. See: https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/signal-tutorial-second-p...

> Is it strictly-true that anti-spam algorithms must be hidden to be effective?

Can't answer that but there were, for a long time, services that would run your "targeted emails" through spamassassin et al for you and give you advice on how to tweak them to lower the resultant score.

I've fought spam in other contexts and found that to be true. A change stopped spam until spammers learned what the change was, which made them adapt. The adaption might not be perfect, but it would happen, so prolonging the blocked period was essential. If one can do something that's effective and that the spammers don't understand for months, that's great. If they can spam for days and then blocked for a longer period and that repeats, they'll go away and attack an easier target instead (well, some of them will look back later).

Let me try an argument other than "it's been my experience", though.

Suppose that it's not true. In that case, the anti-spam filter provides a publicly visible definition of spam in its code, and it's one that isn't grounded in the recipients' opinions. If the filter is to be effective, spammers must not be able to adapt their behaviour in a way that users consider spam but isn't according to the definition. Many people have tried to provide such a definition since 1995 and AIUI all have failed. I think the persisten failure indicates that it's extremely unlikely that one can be found, and therefore it's extremely unlikely that a publicly visible spam filter can be as effective as one that can be updated in secret.

Not looking forward to this... I use bots and I bet this will make them stop working at some inconvenient time.

I wish I could put up collateral, say stablecoin in a smart contract, where Signal can ban my account and keep the money if I abuse, but otherwise do not break my automation.

Signal was superb for a long time, and then received a hefty chunk of funding, and, although I may be wrong, has declined since then, and in fact jumped the shark about a year ago.

They attempted ever more forcefully to make users to set a PIN to protect server-side state; it started with a dialog at the bottom of the screen, obscuring about 20% of the user list, which could not be dimissed, and then after a few weeks progressed to the a full page dialog, which could not be dismissed - rendering the app unusable.

All you saw upon starting was the full page dialog demanding you set a PIN to continue using Signal.

I did not want any server-side state, and so did not set a PIN, and stopped using Signal. After a few weeks, the full-page dialog went away, and I found I could use Signal again.

Signal actually blocked usage of the app to force users to adopt unwanted new functionality. It's hard to imagine any app doing well with such mis-management.

I opened a thread discussing the problem on their support/public discussion forum, which was deleted. I also at first opened a bug report on Git, before I understood it was all intentional, this was also deleted.

Since this experience, I've regarded Signal as on the way out, but it's still the best there is right now.