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Because of contact discovery and migration. The success of those apps is directly related to the fact you can instantly see all your contacts with it when it fi

Because of contact discovery and migration. The success of those apps is directly related to the fact you can instantly see all your contacts with it when it first start. Email wouldn't have the same effect because poeple don't have them saved in the contact list. I think university should have a mandatory course where IT student go and interact with real users and have a budget to manage according to the success of their exhange. It would make those questions much less likely.

dijit 7y ago
Not sure I agree. Although I’m not 100% certain of all smartphone implementations. But I definitely have emails for everyone in my addressbook/contacts list. It’s the only thing that exists which can be anonymised properly and is static through many centralised providers. Otherwise it’s back to usernames and the bazaar that is: does this person /actually/ have their names on telegram/skype/whatever
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  See second part of my comment. You are in the HN bubble.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    I don't think this is true at all, maybe you are in a USA bubble? People in other parts of the world do not seem have a problem adding each other on LINE or Facebook for example without using a phone number at all. Meanwhile one friend of mine has lived in France, the UK and Germany in the last few years and I have no idea what his current phone number(s) are or what country they are from. Many acquaintances who I have not spoken to for some time have most likely moved abroad at some point and I doubt any of the phone numbers I have for them are still correct. In my experience, for reasons like this, people do not generally bother swapping phone numbers any more. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia recently, I was unable to sign up for Discord because they required verification with a phone number. My local phone number was rejected because it was prepay, not a contract. I wonder how many people in that part of the world have a phone contract? Does Signal also enforce that requirement? Should access to secure comminications really be linked to one's credit history in that way?
sweden 7y ago
The lack of automatic contact discovery never stopped people of looking up each other on Facebook. I don't see why messaging would be different.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  Of course it did: facebook actually started by using the university contacts to propagate using a spammer strategy. Now that it can't, it invasive use your personal information to suggest contacts.

dijit 7y ago

Not sure I agree. Although I’m not 100% certain of all smartphone implementations. But I definitely have emails for everyone in my addressbook/contacts list. It’s the only thing that exists which can be anonymised properly and is static through many centralised providers. Otherwise it’s back to usernames and the bazaar that is: does this person /actually/ have their names on telegram/skype/whatever

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
See second part of my comment. You are in the HN bubble.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  I don't think this is true at all, maybe you are in a USA bubble? People in other parts of the world do not seem have a problem adding each other on LINE or Facebook for example without using a phone number at all. Meanwhile one friend of mine has lived in France, the UK and Germany in the last few years and I have no idea what his current phone number(s) are or what country they are from. Many acquaintances who I have not spoken to for some time have most likely moved abroad at some point and I doubt any of the phone numbers I have for them are still correct. In my experience, for reasons like this, people do not generally bother swapping phone numbers any more. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia recently, I was unable to sign up for Discord because they required verification with a phone number. My local phone number was rejected because it was prepay, not a contract. I wonder how many people in that part of the world have a phone contract? Does Signal also enforce that requirement? Should access to secure comminications really be linked to one's credit history in that way?

sweden 7y ago

The lack of automatic contact discovery never stopped people of looking up each other on Facebook. I don't see why messaging would be different.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
Of course it did: facebook actually started by using the university contacts to propagate using a spammer strategy. Now that it can't, it invasive use your personal information to suggest contacts.