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Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?
I can pick up PAYG Sims for verifying for essentially nothing (I think the cheapest I've seen here is 10p). A phone number proves, and stops nothing. If you can't detect spam from either the message, the volume or from other users reporting, then you have bigger problems.
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It raises the cost for any spammer, including determined actors. More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers. A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.
> More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers Not a big deal, there's sms verification services, they have APIs and premade libraries, cost is about ~$0.06/verification depending on which service you use, and less with bulk discounts.
Are softbank actually the biggest idiots in VC? It almost seems like everything they invest in is a handshake deal built on "just trust me bro" numbers.
>Masayoshi Son. He had for many years the distinction of being the person who had lost the most money in history (more than $59bn[38] during the dot com crash of 2000 alone, when his SoftBank shares plummeted),[39] a feat surpassed by Elon Musk[40][41][42] in the following decades.
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It raises the cost for any spammer, including determined actors. More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers. A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.
There are scenarios, such as communicating with my children, where someone doesn't have a phone number. Hangouts worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo/whatever the other one was, that's all I was saying.
The sad part of it all ... Google Talk - by orders of magnitude their best chat offering was just xmpp/jabber the whole time.
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Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?
You can purchase access to phone numbers for the purposes of verifying accounts. While phone numbers are a method to prevent easy sybil attacks, it is not effective when dealing with a determined actor.
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I can pick up PAYG Sims for verifying for essentially nothing (I think the cheapest I've seen here is 10p). A phone number proves, and stops nothing. If you can't detect spam from either the message, the volume or from other users reporting, then you have bigger problems.
But you can’t automate that trivially
You are focussing on the wrong point, I only mentioned that because I could get on these services with a disposable number.
It boasts of 10M+ downloads in Google Play
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You can purchase access to phone numbers for the purposes of verifying accounts. While phone numbers are a method to prevent easy sybil attacks, it is not effective when dealing with a determined actor.
It raises the cost for any spammer, including determined actors. More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers. A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.
Just because the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving out their phone number, it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get sim swapped and have all of my bank accounts drained because some random company with zero security measures demands I provide my phone number to use their app.
I guess this is the way to get rich quick now. Imagine a company with millions of fake users all created by a LLM app.
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Only one of those doesn't require your phone number. It'll be nice when we get to the point where we can have a proper working chat app that doesn't require one. Hangouts used to be great but Google has to always make sure their chat doesn't work.
Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?