I mentioned this on another HN thread, but I personally have my default ringtone set to a 0.1s mp3 of silence I made once. I then gave everyone in my address b

I mentioned this on another HN thread, but I personally have my default ringtone set to a 0.1s mp3 of silence I made once. I then gave everyone in my address book group a real ringtone. Pretty much anyone in there I actually care if they call. All others can leave a message. As for the parent post's preference for SMS. Most people I know are on XMPP (well. basically google hangouts), Telegram, Signal.. I'm not a fan of the multitude of walled gardens that the chat world has become, but SMS is pretty limiting and still not guaranteed to be free. There's 2 people I still talk with on SMS - the rest are on more featureful chat clients. I also do get a considerable amount of SMS spam, unfortunately. Oh, also, I use google voice for my SMS 'cause my main plan does charge for SMS - I don't particularly care about this since no one I know really uses it anyway, and the few who do are easy to redirect to google voice.