4 ms·

The best way to end up on my Giant List of Most-Hated Entities is to send me a text message. Texts are for friends and family only. I'll tolerate the occasional

The best way to end up on my Giant List of Most-Hated Entities is to send me a text message. Texts are for friends and family only. I'll tolerate the occasional appointment confirmation text, but other than that, my text inbox is the last place that has yet to be invaded by spammers. And don't play dumb, randomly texting someone "Go Vote!" is absolutely spam. Texting someone because some sign-up form had automatic opt-in is equally spammy.

parennoob 10y ago
Yeah, something tells me I don't want to receive random text messages from "X with Z for Congress" inviting me to rallies. My reply to them would be considerably less polite than the one shown in their screenshot.
physcab 10y ago
This last election was brutal for my phone. Every day for two weeks I got atleast 1 text and sometimes 5 reminding me to vote for some particular candidate or issue. I don't know how my number got on these lists, but I replied STOP to every one of them.
- kovacs 10y ago
  yup, same
- h4xr 10y ago
  Your number is sold by the state from your voter registration information. A phone number is not required to vote and is used solely for that purpose.
saurik 10y ago
Everyone has different boundaries. For me: phone calls are for friends and family and texts messages are public; when I hand people my business cards I tell them "SMS only". I also despise email, but really don't mind receiving tons of text messages every day. Since no one is the same, it just isn't fair to be as annoyed as you are, especially when it sounds like your problem is so completely trivially solved that you have no one to blame but yourself: turn off notifications for text messages from people who are not in your address book. Ok, and now someone has downvoted me within seconds of me posting that paragraph; the "I hate people contacting me" crowd is so amazingly vicious :/. Let's look at this from another perspective: I work with a group called Student Activist Network. The entire point of this group is you give them your phone number and they text you when actions come up related to your interests. Much like how anti-email spam people never are willing to believe that some people sign up for mailing lists on purpose, I bet they are also going to refuse to believe that hundreds of activists and protesters specifically want this kind of functionality, and right now the distribution is done manually by people copy/pasting.
- garysieling 10y ago
  They're complaining about being "randomly" texted without signing up for something.
  - saurik 10y ago
    Which is not a legitimate thing--and I will argue is actually an incredibly harmful thing--to have bubbled to the top of a thread about a tool like Hustle: I bet it is an extremely minority use for someone to try to use a tool like this to just randomly send messages to ranges of phone numbers.
    - garysieling 10y ago
      I don't think that's what people are suggesting is happening. A couple people who have my contact information from playing local sports have added me to email lists for causes they care about, which is incredibly irritating. I could see this happening with a texting tool.
- detaro 10y ago
  Anti-spam people in general not believing in legitimate mailing lists is a pretty bad misrepresentation IMHO.
  - saurik 10y ago
    Well, it's "generally" true: go look through threads on this stuff; what you always see are people who get extremely upset about having received e-mail, and it isn't actual spam by the legal definition: Amazon sending me random "junk" because I bought something from them is not spam, as I have a prior business relationship with them and I probably left some box checked and started getting their e-mails... yet these people don't think "ok, I guess I don't want that and I'll stop Amazon sending it", nor do they even think "ok, that's what kill files are for: I'll just make it so e-mails like this one get filtered by my e-mail infrastructure"... instead, you see rants about "how dare someone send me e-mail" and then they abuse the shared resource of a spam filter by marking it as spam :/. I sign up for these things. I actually like receiving e-mail marketing updates from some companies, and I essentially never dislike it: but the anti-spam blok are ruining shared spam filters by marking stuff that isn't spam as spam. And this is yet another great example: the tool Hustle is extremely close to the thing that Student Activist Network wanted--they have a ton of different tags that people use to specify interests and then do delivery decisions based on filters--and it doesn't deserve the top post being "how dare someone send me a text message": if nothing else, it scares people off of building stuff like this for fear of retribution from people like that poster, and that's bad for people who are sufficiently organized as to not freak out if someone dares to send them stuff.

parennoob 10y ago

Yeah, something tells me I don't want to receive random text messages from "X with Z for Congress" inviting me to rallies. My reply to them would be considerably less polite than the one shown in their screenshot.

physcab 10y ago

This last election was brutal for my phone. Every day for two weeks I got atleast 1 text and sometimes 5 reminding me to vote for some particular candidate or issue. I don't know how my number got on these lists, but I replied STOP to every one of them.

kovacs 10y ago
yup, same
h4xr 10y ago
Your number is sold by the state from your voter registration information. A phone number is not required to vote and is used solely for that purpose.

saurik 10y ago

Everyone has different boundaries. For me: phone calls are for friends and family and texts messages are public; when I hand people my business cards I tell them "SMS only". I also despise email, but really don't mind receiving tons of text messages every day. Since no one is the same, it just isn't fair to be as annoyed as you are, especially when it sounds like your problem is so completely trivially solved that you have no one to blame but yourself: turn off notifications for text messages from people who are not in your address book. Ok, and now someone has downvoted me within seconds of me posting that paragraph; the "I hate people contacting me" crowd is so amazingly vicious :/. Let's look at this from another perspective: I work with a group called Student Activist Network. The entire point of this group is you give them your phone number and they text you when actions come up related to your interests. Much like how anti-email spam people never are willing to believe that some people sign up for mailing lists on purpose, I bet they are also going to refuse to believe that hundreds of activists and protesters specifically want this kind of functionality, and right now the distribution is done manually by people copy/pasting.

garysieling 10y ago
They're complaining about being "randomly" texted without signing up for something.
- saurik 10y ago
  Which is not a legitimate thing--and I will argue is actually an incredibly harmful thing--to have bubbled to the top of a thread about a tool like Hustle: I bet it is an extremely minority use for someone to try to use a tool like this to just randomly send messages to ranges of phone numbers.
  - garysieling 10y ago
    I don't think that's what people are suggesting is happening. A couple people who have my contact information from playing local sports have added me to email lists for causes they care about, which is incredibly irritating. I could see this happening with a texting tool.
detaro 10y ago
Anti-spam people in general not believing in legitimate mailing lists is a pretty bad misrepresentation IMHO.
- saurik 10y ago
  Well, it's "generally" true: go look through threads on this stuff; what you always see are people who get extremely upset about having received e-mail, and it isn't actual spam by the legal definition: Amazon sending me random "junk" because I bought something from them is not spam, as I have a prior business relationship with them and I probably left some box checked and started getting their e-mails... yet these people don't think "ok, I guess I don't want that and I'll stop Amazon sending it", nor do they even think "ok, that's what kill files are for: I'll just make it so e-mails like this one get filtered by my e-mail infrastructure"... instead, you see rants about "how dare someone send me e-mail" and then they abuse the shared resource of a spam filter by marking it as spam :/. I sign up for these things. I actually like receiving e-mail marketing updates from some companies, and I essentially never dislike it: but the anti-spam blok are ruining shared spam filters by marking stuff that isn't spam as spam. And this is yet another great example: the tool Hustle is extremely close to the thing that Student Activist Network wanted--they have a ton of different tags that people use to specify interests and then do delivery decisions based on filters--and it doesn't deserve the top post being "how dare someone send me a text message": if nothing else, it scares people off of building stuff like this for fear of retribution from people like that poster, and that's bad for people who are sufficiently organized as to not freak out if someone dares to send them stuff.