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How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore? Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting

How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore? Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made). It's really rare I even get a call from someone in my contact list - even for something "urgent" most people just send a text ("call me - urgent!" is serious). Anything for work is scheduled, and even then it's been years since it was anything but zoom/teams/etc. Part of this I think is a shift in the way people operate with technology: texting is faster and better than voicemail. Slack, zoom, etc dominate workplaces. Part is it's been ruined by spam. I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you. Had the PSTN not existed and you were to try to launch "Telephone" as an app today, it would almost certainly fail. "You get a unique 10 digit number and if anyone types it in, it makes your device ring loudly, 24/7, no matter what else you're doing, and you're instantly placed in a two-way audio call with them!"

irrational 5y ago
The one problem with this is we still have a landline. All the time people will complain that we didn’t answer their text. They don’t seem to know how to respond when told it can’t receive texts. Then they promptly forget because the same people try texting us over and over again. I wish there was some way a number that can’t receive texts could immediately respond and let them know.
- PKop 5y ago
  Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number?
  - irrational 5y ago
    How does that solve the problem? Landlines will still continue to exist and people will still mistakenly believe they can receive texts. It seems like a doable solution to have non-mobile numbers auto return a message that it cannot receive text messages. Where do the text messages to landlines go? Into a black hole? I assume there is a service that at some point realized that the number cannot receive a text message and sends it to dev/nul. Instead, why can't that service ping back?
    - PKop 5y ago
      >How does that solve the problem? It directly solves your problem does it not? You now have a number that can receive texts... I don't understand your confusion. I'm specifically asking you why do you have a landline? The "problem" is solved by not having one. >to have non-mobile numbers auto return a message that it cannot receive text messages I've seen these errors when I've mistakenly sent an sms to a landline. This already exists, maybe just for some carriers though.
      - irrational 5y ago
        I can have a landline if I want. There is no law that I have to get a mobile number.
        PKop 5y ago
        I'm not talking about laws, I legitimately am just asking why you want to lol. Username checks out
        irrational 5y ago
        Our children do not have cell phones and their baby sitters often don't have cell phones (at least the younger baby sitters). A landline allows those without cell phones to make calls out of the house.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number? For me, because I live in a large, dense city, my apartment is in a place where other, larger building surround it. As such, I have poor cellular reception in my home. As such, if I don't have a "landline" (actually a VOIP line), I would often be unreachable at home.
    - chillwaves 5y ago
      WiFi calling is the answer.
      - nobody9999 5y ago
        >WiFi calling is the answer. And despite the fact that my provider claims to support such a thing, and my phone supports it, I am unable to to use WiFi calling. Your use case is not mine. Don't pretend to have all the answers to a situation of which you are ignorant. It's unhelpful and unpleasant. Edit: My comment was also unhelpful. I was going to delete it, but instead I'm going to leave it up and qualify my remarks by saying that your suggestion is a good one, and despite the fact that it's inappropriate to the circumstance, thank you.
        chillwaves 5y ago
        Actually had to use WiFi calling yesterday and it just didn't work on my main #. Only my app based phone # (Google Voice) worked! That was a really unpleasant discovery since I had no cell service. Definitely affirms what you are saying -- it doesn't always work! Yesterday was the first time I ever had a problem. No errors or warnings, the calls just never go through.
freyir 5y ago
My phone has a setting to not ring or vibrate unless it’s a recognized number. That alone has largely solved the issue for me. Fortunately I don’t need to answer calls from unrecognized numbers my job.
- criddell 5y ago
  I'd like my phone to have a setting where unknown callers get a busy signal. I don't want my phone to ring and I don't want it going to voicemail. At the very least, these companies with their amazing machine intelligence divisions ought to be able to figure out that a message that is 2 seconds long and silent isn't actually a message.
kbxkbxkhx 5y ago
When my last on-call rotation ended in 2018, I started forwarding all calls to voicemail and haven't looked back. I suspect I could have done so earlier considering voice was a fallback for sms which was a fallback for push, but I was paranoid about missed alerts.
jrd259 5y ago
Just today I got two phone calls that showed up as "Unknown". Neither was spam. One was my family doctor, the other a local bicycle shop. If it matters, I'm in Toronto, using an Android phone, with Rogers as my carrier. The first might be due to privacy (of the doctor). The second I can't explain. But in any case, blocking all unknown calls would not be in my interest at present. I can hang up pretty quickly when I hear the boiler-room background and some dude asking me about Air Duct Cleaning.
- mjevans 5y ago
  Businesses __must__ call from a registered business line. Caller ID should tell me who is properly calling. I won't answer it otherwise, and I really detest how frequent 'personal phone for business' is how places expect people to operate. At the very least they should have to bounce the call through a switchboard somewhere that rings me from the business line.
jdavis703 5y ago
I answer all the time. My HMO always calls from unknown or blocked numbers. And because of HIPPA they can’t leave a voicemail detailing the reason for the call (I’m not sure if I should be upset at HHS or the FCC here.)
- DavidPeiffer 5y ago
  You can typically check a box on the HIPAA form allowing them to leave detailed messages. I could also see your provider deciding to never leave detailed messages as a risk mitigation method.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  Is the doctor not allowed to request that you call them back in a voicemail? There is no HIPAA violation in requesting a callback.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    They probably can. But it’s an HMO with thousands of doctors and a non-deterministic phone tree. I don’t even know if staff know what phone number they’re calling from.
ilamont 5y ago
It's not the HN readers that the FCC is concerned with. It's people like my aunt, who through decades of pre-2000 household conditioning, immediately stop whatever they are doing and rush to answer a ringing phone even though 98% of the calls are junk and the volume of incoming calls is 5-10x what they were in the 80s or 90s. No matter how many times I suggest not bothering to even look at the phone, she cannot resist. Further, this cohort is largely unable to use the tools we take for granted. Many seniors don't know how to block or screen calls, let along apply the phone's do not disturb features. She has been phished multiple times via email, and every time I check her Mac I have to uninstall scammy browser bars and search redirects. Technology platforms and policy makers have failed people like her. I'm assuming many people on HN are their extended family's de facto IT support team. It's exhausting.
- theamk 5y ago
  If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out.
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    The scammers all forge local numbers into the call headers because phone infrastructure is traaaaaaaash.
    - MiddleEndian 5y ago
      Is SHAKEN/STIR supposed to reveal the originator info for real now? I have noted I've been getting slightly fewer random phone calls recently.
  - bigwavedave 5y ago
    > If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out. I would normally say "n=1" and "YMMV", but in this case n=everyone I've ever had this discussion with and the mileage has not varied. I don't know about you, but I have received exactly one phone call in the past year from a 1-800 number, and it was legitimate. You know how many calls I receive daily on average from people spoofing what they think is my local area code? Seven. Sometimes it's none, sometimes it's 12, but I have been tracking it for this exact purpose and the average is 7. That's too many. Do you think anyone would have adopted email if the only two options to deal with spam were 1) read the text in the body and manually delete it if you can recognize the scam or 2) disable incoming mail from anyone not already in your address book? Of course not! And it's high time that the company charging me for my expensive phone and my expensive service plan do something about the expensive attention I waste when getting interrupted with these extremely preventable attempts at exploitation. Not to mention the poor victims who fall for these scams and lose their retirement savings because they grew up in an era before incoming calls became synonymous with massive social engineering dragnets. I apologize for ranting- I recognize you were offering a workaround in the meantime for the parent and I've upvoted you for that; I rarely rant on HN, but this topic and the apathy surrounding it really ruffles my feathers and I needed an outlet.
fjert 5y ago
Personally, almost never. My phone is always on do not disturb with work and family contacts added to my favorites to bypass do not disturb. If an unrecognized number is calling from, say, my dentist's office then they usually leave a voicemail and I'll know whether to return the call. Otherwise, I just assume it's spam.
enobrev 5y ago
I have DND on all day/night for exactly this reason. It's set up to allows calls from people in my contact list to get through - which is fine because none of them are going to call me unless they _really_ need to. What's frustrating is when dealing with a healthcare provider or contractor or something, where they're going to call within the next couple of days, as then I need to turn off DND and open up the potential for the spam calls to make my phone ring. Fortunately there are far fewer spam calls this year, but there are still a few. > I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you I think that's a huge part of it, along with all the new asynchronous forms of communication we have put together in the last couple decades. 30+ years ago, you could visit, call, page, or send a letter. There was no immediate means of sending a fully thought-out message that the recipient would receive quickly and then be able to answer on their own time in the range of immediately through never. I definitely prefer it this way. Maybe 14-year-old me who could talk on the phone for hours wouldn't be a huge fan, but adult me very happily keeps overall phone time to a few minutes per month.
- asdff 5y ago
  I feel like living somewhere and having an area code from somewhere else is a secret hack for this. Call from my area code 1000 miles away? Definitely without a doubt spam. Call from the local area code? Almost always legitimate. If I ended up having a local number I'd lose this natural filter.
  - enobrev 5y ago
    Absolutely! My number is from a city I haven't lived in since 2012. Anyone I know who calls me from that city is definitely in my contacts. Everything else is spam or politicians (also spam, but less so as someone who had voted in local races).
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    I feel like a lot of spam networks have worked around this. When I went to school hundreds of miles away from my area code, I got very few spam calls from my phone's area code. Most came from the area code I was living in.
cjensen 5y ago
Sure, I don't but... my spouse helps take care of her parents. They aren't fluent in English, so my spouse handles all the calls and callbacks. That means she gets calls from unknown callers frequently that she must answer. It's a big issue for people who actually need to answer calls from novel callers.
silisili 5y ago
When I was younger I thought like this. As I got older, and my thumbs fatter, I tend to answer it if I'm expecting a call(windshield replacement at the moment), or a contact, or just curious. If nobody ever answers, then I'd never get to talk to my parents, and I value that time so make time pretty much no matter what I'm doing, within reason. I don't hate texting, but strongly do for some use cases. I was trying to get directions from a friend recently via text and it just became... annoying. Something like me - ok, which building is it I'm outside wait them - you see the red one? me - yes, is that it? wait them - ok it's two down from that At this point I called, because I'm not going to text and wait again to ask left or right(above example is not exact, but similar to this). I think texting is great for saying hi, or asking a question. I do not in any way find it useful for conversation or back and forths. Just my .02. I do wish phone numbers weren't guessable items but something more like, say, long random addresses so that companies couldn't just flip through dialing anyone and everyone. I haven't thought out how discoverability would work though without something like DNS.
jeroenhd 5y ago
That seems very American-centric. I answer every phone call I have and only twice in my life has the call been an attempt to sell me anything. Both times I've left my number and forgot to disable the checkbox that said "you can call me once for a sales offer". There's nothing in "society" that prevents phones from being a normal thing. It's all in the signal to noise ratio of the phone calls themselves, and that's a solvable problem. Business owners whose numbers have been published have the same problem here: loads of scammers and scummy salesmen spamming their phones all day long. I'd consider it a mistake to use a publicly listed number as your always-on contact method, but that's victim blaming and not a real solution to the problem. My point is: with some proper oversight and enforcement of decent laws, there's nothing wrong with phone numbers. Every major chat app and mobile platform has some kind of (video) calling functionality for a reason, interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use. The failure of the American telecommunications market doesn't take away from that elsewhere in the world.
- gregmac 5y ago
  > interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use Really? I'm dumbstruck by this sentiment. I've never met or even heard someone express they like being interrupted with a unsolicited, unexpected (video) call. I'm Canadian, and my team is all remote, with people in Canada, US, UK, Portugal and Romania. No one does unsolicited video calls.. at all. Don't get me wrong, we do lots of video calls, including adhoc ones, but those are always started with a DM like "hey, have a few minutes to chat?" If I'm deep in something, I'll reply with "maybe in an hour or so" and if I'm ready right then I'll just call. Sorry but not asking first just seems rude and totally disrespectful of the other person's time.
  - maltalex 5y ago
    > Really? I'm dumbstruck by this sentiment. I've never met or even heard someone express they like being interrupted with a unsolicited, unexpected (video) call. How about a call from a family member or friend that need urgent help?
caf 5y ago
I answer calls. My family still often calls, and I know people who can't take a phone to work so they have to use a landline to call. The spam call detection on Android works pretty well for me, it seems to catch and block at least 90% of the spam calls.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
foobiekr 5y ago
An older relation has gotten sick and my wife and I have to track their medical care. the hospital and doctors will ONLY talk on the phone, and only do things like callbacks. So after 21 years of essentially never answering the phone, I now have to answer from a variety of unknown numbers. it is frustrating, I'd much prefer text messages.
alfalfasprout 5y ago
I definitely call a lot. Whether it's talking to friends, relatives, or dealing with appointments (doctors, car, etc.) there's lots of calls all the time. I travel a fair bit and often find calling is the only way to get airlines to fix certain problems. I tend to screen by area code. My cell is from a place where everyone I'd want to talk to is in my contacts list. So only calls local to where I live I actually answer. Also if it's urgent people leave a voicemail or call again.
jbritton 5y ago
My landline phone has a very loud ring, non-adjustable. If I’m sitting near it, it is quite annoying. I frequently get calls when I’m asleep. I also get them in the middle of work video calls and since the ringing won’t stop, I have to pick them up. I get dozens a day, every day. I have reached a tipping point where I actual feel as though I’m being tortured. I seriously wish the phone companies would be held to account to fix this problem. I suspect the vast majority of phone calls to be illegal telemarketing calls which should revoke the telecoms common carrier status. They should not be allowed to profit from massive illegality.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Asking out of curiosity, why isn’t replacing the phone an option? :)
  - jbritton 5y ago
    It’s definitely possible. I should probably do it. But other than the loud ring it has worked perfectly with very clear sound forever. Perhaps relocated to a different location would also be an option.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Mechanical or electronic ringer? Is there absolutely no volume control? Mechanical bells can be damped, muted, or removed. This was frequently done in offices back in olden times.
Zenst 5y ago
> Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made). That is my personal choice, alas many Doctors, government departments, companies etc etc alas withhold there numbers and a right PITA it is as well. This is in the UK.
satronaut 5y ago
yeah, outside of a tech job people still heavily rely on phone calls to get their jobs done. Sales, HR, field services, etc all call people directly since a text message could be missed for hours. And a lot of stuff is still based on legacy systems (manually inputing info or hand writing records)
ta1234567890 5y ago
Pretty much everyday I get 5+ spam calls, almost all from numbers with area codes in Texas (no idea why). The calls start at 7:30am. My number is in the federal do not call list. I used to manually block every single number from spam calls, but now I gave up. I’ll just never answer a call unless it’s from a known number and I’m expecting it. Otherwise I’ll just return it later if it’s important enough. My guess is that phone network operators don’t care because they haven’t figured out a way to make money blocking these calls. At the same time, the same carriers are going out of their way to block text messages from businesses that legitimately use services like Twilio to communicate with their users/customers. Why? Because the alternative for these businesses is to pay about $3k setup fee + $3k/quarter to get a shortcode for the privilege of texting the carriers customers - the same customers the carriers don’t care about protecting from spam phone calls.
- coldcode 5y ago
  I fill up my voicemail ever week, 99% of them from the area code of my phone, which is 1500 mi from where I live now, and all are spam. I wish I could just block an area code.
  - gregmac 5y ago
    I use Calls Blacklist [1] to block calls from unrecognized numbers -- just checked, it supports blocking numbers based on "Starts with" so that would probably work, if you're on Android. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladlee.easyblacklist&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladlee.ea...
stickfigure 5y ago
My phone doesn't even ring if the # isn't in my contact list. Just goes straight to voicemail. Easy to do with Android "Do Not Disturb" rules. Yeah, the "Telephone" app is the worst feature on my phone.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Yeah, the "Telephone" app is the worst feature on my phone. ... I have just devised the perfect marketing pitch for the pinephone. (Yes, I know calls are working these days; work with me here)
Trias11 5y ago
I totally agree on the point that any random individual trying to inflict "sync" voice interaction on anyone deserves to be ignored for good. That said however gateway providers are consciously funneling malicious crap to citizens. And they ought to be held responsible for that by the law. This will fix the problem.
gambiting 5y ago
I just think this is uniquely American problem and for some reason American carriers are completely uninterested in dealing with it. Here in UK I get maybe....1 spam call every 3 months? If even that. And it's always the same robo-voice that you can recognize within 2 seconds and disconnect. I have absolutely no issues answering my phone.
- arlcode 5y ago
  Yeah same here in Germany. Zero ever on my mobile phone (and I know the number has been leaked by at least one breach). Maybe 1 per month on the landline of my parents and these days it's exclusively "Microsoft" trying to "fix" their computer (weirdly enough with an English speaking scammer). Either Germans are not a valuable target for "legit" companies or some regulation is working it's magic behind the scene.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    My feeling is that Americans are easier targets of fraud for technical and legal reasons. E.g. 'stealing someones identity' is a thing. Where I live, SSN and driver licenses are public record (you can get a photo copy of anyones driver license), so they are unusable for fax scams. Having a system built on such items being 'secret' is probably a culprit.
  - distances 5y ago
    I've been thinking that what probably helps too is the fact all German speaking countries are wealthy. Much harder to build a spam center with human callers.
    - arlcode 5y ago
      Could be that. On the other hand some (legitimate) support call centers are located in Eastern Europe so it's possible to find enough German speakers there (although not native ones).
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >Either Germans are not a valuable target for "legit" companies or some regulation is working it's magic behind the scene. IIUC, telecoms in DE charge the originator of the call for call completion, while in the US, telecoms charge the originator and the recipient. As such, US telecoms have a vested interest in completing scam/spam calls while that is not the case in DE. I may be misunderstanding this, so if someone more knowledgeable could comment I'd appreciate it.
KZerda 5y ago
I started answering scam calls. And pressing 1 when it said so to speak with someone about my microsoft account, apple account, car warranty, etc. And telling the person on the other end to kindly fuck off. After a few rounds of this, the calls stopped calling, as I'd gotten on enough of the spammer blacklists of someone who will waste their time. It took a while to build up the courage to do so, but I'm glad I did, because when the phone rings now, I can be reasonably assured that it's someone who I actually want to talk to.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Do one better, get their contact info and then sue. They are all breaking some law, so once you have their info it is easy to win in court. You pretty much need to be a lawyer to pull the above off.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >Do one better, get their contact info and then sue. They are all breaking some law, so once you have their info it is easy to win in court. Since most scam/spam calls have spoofed caller iD, how do you obtain such contact information? Do tell. I have time on my hands, so I'd love to take this route.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      They need to give you information on how to send your payment that works, so you need to lead them on until they give you that information. Once you have that you have a place that really exists, and courts can go from there.
      - speedybird 5y ago
        They tell you to buy a bunch of gift cards at the grocery store and then read the number off the card over the phone. How do you successfully sue them with that information?
      - nobody9999 5y ago
the__alchemist 5y ago
I do. If it's an unknown number, it's probably someone from work not on my contacts list trying to coordinate someone.
afarrell 5y ago
> I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you. This is why I drifted away from my friends and family until I set up an account on https://calendly.com/ https://calendly.com/ where they could book time to talk with me.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
One of the many things I despise about the NHS’s (UK universal health system) bureaucracy is that for some brain-dead reason they insist on calling on withheld numbers. I’ve been conditioned into ignoring withheld numbers by years of scammers, spammers, and even a nutty ex who’d use it to try getting around my call blocking. They also seem to have call waiting systems designed to be as frustrating as possible so people give up and just suffer with their ailments without deigning to bother the NHS about them. I’m so glad the world seems to be slowly adopting a policy of “text before call” even if a few family members have picked up an irritating habit of using recorded voice messages rather than texting (I disabled my voicemail a decade ago for a reason). It should be considered rude to call people without warning them I think.
mech422 5y ago
>>texting is faster and better than voicemail. Personally, I find voice coms higher bandwidth and overall faster then texting/email. And email with sorting, filtering and searching capabilities is miles better then texting for me.
AndyMcConachie 5y ago
People outside of the United States also read HN. I answer my phone here in The Netherlands. I understand how bad it is in the US, but don't assume HN is just US.
krageon 5y ago
> How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore? Everyone that works for a large company and has any kind of corporation-spanning responsibility. Phone calls are almost always the last fallback if someone really needs to reach you for something critical.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  I used to work in IT. We had a system where every call would be sent to voicemail- "Please briefly describe the issue, and let us know how to contact you."- and would arrive in .mp3 attachment in an email inbox. Within 15 minutes someone would listen to the voicemail, transform it into a regular written ticket, and prioritize the issue that way. We never needed someone chain-linked to a phone receiver.
  - krageon 5y ago
    This is how you woke someone up at night if you need to figure out why a specific server is given some arcane error? I can't imagine it is, this is a system for during the day not so critical time. And for that it's probably great (at the very least it's cool!).
matheusmoreira 5y ago
I don't answer the phone anymore. I don't think I ever did to begin with. I hate phones. I have a subscription because it's impossible to get mobile internet without it and nearly all mobile software uses phone numbers for identification and authentication. Wish I could turn off the calls. I don't want people to call me! I want people to message me. It used to be easy to ignore. Now with all these automated calls the system has become unusable and unbearable. Every single day I get at least 5 automated calls and my phone always thinks they're the most important things in the world, worthy of my immediate attention and warranting the interruption of anything I'm doing. It makes me wish I could delete the telephony app without breaking the phone! That's what phones are, most fundamentally. They're human interrupts. When I call people, I'm interrupting them in order to make them talk to me. There's this underlying assumption that the call is more important than anything. People will ignore other humans in front of them in order to answer calls! Hard to think of anything more disrespectful. That may have been tolerable back then when phones were the best technology we had but they've been obsolete ever since asynchronous messaging became a thing. Why can't phones just disappear? What's keeping them alive? I have lots of family with landlines. Older people who still think of phone lines as something valuable just because they used to be worth a ton of money decades ago. 95%+ of the calls they receive are nothing but a waste of their time. Banks offering them credit cards, loans, scammers. Yet they keep those lines around "just in case"! I simply can't fathom putting up with an advertiser who's brash enough to actually interrupt me with a phone call. That's an unfathomable level of abuse to me.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  James Fisher's article titled 'I hate telephones' resonates so strongly with me on this topic: https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/ https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/ (see also the associated HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677560) You are 100% right- they are human interrupts that we're all subjected to just by virtue of forcing to interact with people and companies who refuse to use an asynchronous medium of communication. Horrifying
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago

irrational 5y ago

The one problem with this is we still have a landline. All the time people will complain that we didn’t answer their text. They don’t seem to know how to respond when told it can’t receive texts. Then they promptly forget because the same people try texting us over and over again. I wish there was some way a number that can’t receive texts could immediately respond and let them know.

PKop 5y ago
Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number?
- irrational 5y ago
  How does that solve the problem? Landlines will still continue to exist and people will still mistakenly believe they can receive texts. It seems like a doable solution to have non-mobile numbers auto return a message that it cannot receive text messages. Where do the text messages to landlines go? Into a black hole? I assume there is a service that at some point realized that the number cannot receive a text message and sends it to dev/nul. Instead, why can't that service ping back?
  - PKop 5y ago
    >How does that solve the problem? It directly solves your problem does it not? You now have a number that can receive texts... I don't understand your confusion. I'm specifically asking you why do you have a landline? The "problem" is solved by not having one. >to have non-mobile numbers auto return a message that it cannot receive text messages I've seen these errors when I've mistakenly sent an sms to a landline. This already exists, maybe just for some carriers though.
    - irrational 5y ago
      I can have a landline if I want. There is no law that I have to get a mobile number.
      - PKop 5y ago
        I'm not talking about laws, I legitimately am just asking why you want to lol. Username checks out
        irrational 5y ago
        Our children do not have cell phones and their baby sitters often don't have cell phones (at least the younger baby sitters). A landline allows those without cell phones to make calls out of the house.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Why don't you get rid of the landline and give these people your cell phone number? For me, because I live in a large, dense city, my apartment is in a place where other, larger building surround it. As such, I have poor cellular reception in my home. As such, if I don't have a "landline" (actually a VOIP line), I would often be unreachable at home.
  - chillwaves 5y ago
    WiFi calling is the answer.
    - nobody9999 5y ago
      >WiFi calling is the answer. And despite the fact that my provider claims to support such a thing, and my phone supports it, I am unable to to use WiFi calling. Your use case is not mine. Don't pretend to have all the answers to a situation of which you are ignorant. It's unhelpful and unpleasant. Edit: My comment was also unhelpful. I was going to delete it, but instead I'm going to leave it up and qualify my remarks by saying that your suggestion is a good one, and despite the fact that it's inappropriate to the circumstance, thank you.
      - chillwaves 5y ago
        Actually had to use WiFi calling yesterday and it just didn't work on my main #. Only my app based phone # (Google Voice) worked! That was a really unpleasant discovery since I had no cell service. Definitely affirms what you are saying -- it doesn't always work! Yesterday was the first time I ever had a problem. No errors or warnings, the calls just never go through.

freyir 5y ago

My phone has a setting to not ring or vibrate unless it’s a recognized number. That alone has largely solved the issue for me. Fortunately I don’t need to answer calls from unrecognized numbers my job.

criddell 5y ago
I'd like my phone to have a setting where unknown callers get a busy signal. I don't want my phone to ring and I don't want it going to voicemail. At the very least, these companies with their amazing machine intelligence divisions ought to be able to figure out that a message that is 2 seconds long and silent isn't actually a message.

kbxkbxkhx 5y ago

When my last on-call rotation ended in 2018, I started forwarding all calls to voicemail and haven't looked back. I suspect I could have done so earlier considering voice was a fallback for sms which was a fallback for push, but I was paranoid about missed alerts.

jrd259 5y ago

Just today I got two phone calls that showed up as "Unknown". Neither was spam. One was my family doctor, the other a local bicycle shop. If it matters, I'm in Toronto, using an Android phone, with Rogers as my carrier. The first might be due to privacy (of the doctor). The second I can't explain. But in any case, blocking all unknown calls would not be in my interest at present. I can hang up pretty quickly when I hear the boiler-room background and some dude asking me about Air Duct Cleaning.

mjevans 5y ago
Businesses __must__ call from a registered business line. Caller ID should tell me who is properly calling. I won't answer it otherwise, and I really detest how frequent 'personal phone for business' is how places expect people to operate. At the very least they should have to bounce the call through a switchboard somewhere that rings me from the business line.

jdavis703 5y ago

I answer all the time. My HMO always calls from unknown or blocked numbers. And because of HIPPA they can’t leave a voicemail detailing the reason for the call (I’m not sure if I should be upset at HHS or the FCC here.)

DavidPeiffer 5y ago
You can typically check a box on the HIPAA form allowing them to leave detailed messages. I could also see your provider deciding to never leave detailed messages as a risk mitigation method.
wildrhythms 5y ago
Is the doctor not allowed to request that you call them back in a voicemail? There is no HIPAA violation in requesting a callback.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  They probably can. But it’s an HMO with thousands of doctors and a non-deterministic phone tree. I don’t even know if staff know what phone number they’re calling from.

ilamont 5y ago

It's not the HN readers that the FCC is concerned with. It's people like my aunt, who through decades of pre-2000 household conditioning, immediately stop whatever they are doing and rush to answer a ringing phone even though 98% of the calls are junk and the volume of incoming calls is 5-10x what they were in the 80s or 90s. No matter how many times I suggest not bothering to even look at the phone, she cannot resist. Further, this cohort is largely unable to use the tools we take for granted. Many seniors don't know how to block or screen calls, let along apply the phone's do not disturb features. She has been phished multiple times via email, and every time I check her Mac I have to uninstall scammy browser bars and search redirects. Technology platforms and policy makers have failed people like her. I'm assuming many people on HN are their extended family's de facto IT support team. It's exhausting.

theamk 5y ago
If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out.
- Pxtl 5y ago
  The scammers all forge local numbers into the call headers because phone infrastructure is traaaaaaaash.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    Is SHAKEN/STIR supposed to reveal the originator info for real now? I have noted I've been getting slightly fewer random phone calls recently.
- bigwavedave 5y ago
  > If your aunt is using a wired phone, I recommend getting a model which has Caller ID with voice announcements. This is great and does not require any effort to learn -- phone says "RING RING CALL FROM 1-800..." and you just tune it out. I would normally say "n=1" and "YMMV", but in this case n=everyone I've ever had this discussion with and the mileage has not varied. I don't know about you, but I have received exactly one phone call in the past year from a 1-800 number, and it was legitimate. You know how many calls I receive daily on average from people spoofing what they think is my local area code? Seven. Sometimes it's none, sometimes it's 12, but I have been tracking it for this exact purpose and the average is 7. That's too many. Do you think anyone would have adopted email if the only two options to deal with spam were 1) read the text in the body and manually delete it if you can recognize the scam or 2) disable incoming mail from anyone not already in your address book? Of course not! And it's high time that the company charging me for my expensive phone and my expensive service plan do something about the expensive attention I waste when getting interrupted with these extremely preventable attempts at exploitation. Not to mention the poor victims who fall for these scams and lose their retirement savings because they grew up in an era before incoming calls became synonymous with massive social engineering dragnets. I apologize for ranting- I recognize you were offering a workaround in the meantime for the parent and I've upvoted you for that; I rarely rant on HN, but this topic and the apathy surrounding it really ruffles my feathers and I needed an outlet.

fjert 5y ago

Personally, almost never. My phone is always on do not disturb with work and family contacts added to my favorites to bypass do not disturb. If an unrecognized number is calling from, say, my dentist's office then they usually leave a voicemail and I'll know whether to return the call. Otherwise, I just assume it's spam.

enobrev 5y ago

I have DND on all day/night for exactly this reason. It's set up to allows calls from people in my contact list to get through - which is fine because none of them are going to call me unless they _really_ need to. What's frustrating is when dealing with a healthcare provider or contractor or something, where they're going to call within the next couple of days, as then I need to turn off DND and open up the potential for the spam calls to make my phone ring. Fortunately there are far fewer spam calls this year, but there are still a few. > I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you I think that's a huge part of it, along with all the new asynchronous forms of communication we have put together in the last couple decades. 30+ years ago, you could visit, call, page, or send a letter. There was no immediate means of sending a fully thought-out message that the recipient would receive quickly and then be able to answer on their own time in the range of immediately through never. I definitely prefer it this way. Maybe 14-year-old me who could talk on the phone for hours wouldn't be a huge fan, but adult me very happily keeps overall phone time to a few minutes per month.

asdff 5y ago
I feel like living somewhere and having an area code from somewhere else is a secret hack for this. Call from my area code 1000 miles away? Definitely without a doubt spam. Call from the local area code? Almost always legitimate. If I ended up having a local number I'd lose this natural filter.
- enobrev 5y ago
  Absolutely! My number is from a city I haven't lived in since 2012. Anyone I know who calls me from that city is definitely in my contacts. Everything else is spam or politicians (also spam, but less so as someone who had voted in local races).
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  I feel like a lot of spam networks have worked around this. When I went to school hundreds of miles away from my area code, I got very few spam calls from my phone's area code. Most came from the area code I was living in.

cjensen 5y ago

Sure, I don't but... my spouse helps take care of her parents. They aren't fluent in English, so my spouse handles all the calls and callbacks. That means she gets calls from unknown callers frequently that she must answer. It's a big issue for people who actually need to answer calls from novel callers.

silisili 5y ago

When I was younger I thought like this. As I got older, and my thumbs fatter, I tend to answer it if I'm expecting a call(windshield replacement at the moment), or a contact, or just curious. If nobody ever answers, then I'd never get to talk to my parents, and I value that time so make time pretty much no matter what I'm doing, within reason. I don't hate texting, but strongly do for some use cases. I was trying to get directions from a friend recently via text and it just became... annoying. Something like me - ok, which building is it I'm outside wait them - you see the red one? me - yes, is that it? wait them - ok it's two down from that At this point I called, because I'm not going to text and wait again to ask left or right(above example is not exact, but similar to this). I think texting is great for saying hi, or asking a question. I do not in any way find it useful for conversation or back and forths. Just my .02. I do wish phone numbers weren't guessable items but something more like, say, long random addresses so that companies couldn't just flip through dialing anyone and everyone. I haven't thought out how discoverability would work though without something like DNS.

jeroenhd 5y ago

That seems very American-centric. I answer every phone call I have and only twice in my life has the call been an attempt to sell me anything. Both times I've left my number and forgot to disable the checkbox that said "you can call me once for a sales offer". There's nothing in "society" that prevents phones from being a normal thing. It's all in the signal to noise ratio of the phone calls themselves, and that's a solvable problem. Business owners whose numbers have been published have the same problem here: loads of scammers and scummy salesmen spamming their phones all day long. I'd consider it a mistake to use a publicly listed number as your always-on contact method, but that's victim blaming and not a real solution to the problem. My point is: with some proper oversight and enforcement of decent laws, there's nothing wrong with phone numbers. Every major chat app and mobile platform has some kind of (video) calling functionality for a reason, interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use. The failure of the American telecommunications market doesn't take away from that elsewhere in the world.

gregmac 5y ago
> interrupting people for a realtime conversation is a feature people want and use Really? I'm dumbstruck by this sentiment. I've never met or even heard someone express they like being interrupted with a unsolicited, unexpected (video) call. I'm Canadian, and my team is all remote, with people in Canada, US, UK, Portugal and Romania. No one does unsolicited video calls.. at all. Don't get me wrong, we do lots of video calls, including adhoc ones, but those are always started with a DM like "hey, have a few minutes to chat?" If I'm deep in something, I'll reply with "maybe in an hour or so" and if I'm ready right then I'll just call. Sorry but not asking first just seems rude and totally disrespectful of the other person's time.
- maltalex 5y ago
  > Really? I'm dumbstruck by this sentiment. I've never met or even heard someone express they like being interrupted with a unsolicited, unexpected (video) call. How about a call from a family member or friend that need urgent help?

caf 5y ago

I answer calls. My family still often calls, and I know people who can't take a phone to work so they have to use a landline to call. The spam call detection on Android works pretty well for me, it seems to catch and block at least 90% of the spam calls.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

foobiekr 5y ago

An older relation has gotten sick and my wife and I have to track their medical care. the hospital and doctors will ONLY talk on the phone, and only do things like callbacks. So after 21 years of essentially never answering the phone, I now have to answer from a variety of unknown numbers. it is frustrating, I'd much prefer text messages.

alfalfasprout 5y ago

I definitely call a lot. Whether it's talking to friends, relatives, or dealing with appointments (doctors, car, etc.) there's lots of calls all the time. I travel a fair bit and often find calling is the only way to get airlines to fix certain problems. I tend to screen by area code. My cell is from a place where everyone I'd want to talk to is in my contacts list. So only calls local to where I live I actually answer. Also if it's urgent people leave a voicemail or call again.

jbritton 5y ago

My landline phone has a very loud ring, non-adjustable. If I’m sitting near it, it is quite annoying. I frequently get calls when I’m asleep. I also get them in the middle of work video calls and since the ringing won’t stop, I have to pick them up. I get dozens a day, every day. I have reached a tipping point where I actual feel as though I’m being tortured. I seriously wish the phone companies would be held to account to fix this problem. I suspect the vast majority of phone calls to be illegal telemarketing calls which should revoke the telecoms common carrier status. They should not be allowed to profit from massive illegality.

kayodelycaon 5y ago
Asking out of curiosity, why isn’t replacing the phone an option? :)
- jbritton 5y ago
  It’s definitely possible. I should probably do it. But other than the loud ring it has worked perfectly with very clear sound forever. Perhaps relocated to a different location would also be an option.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Mechanical or electronic ringer? Is there absolutely no volume control? Mechanical bells can be damped, muted, or removed. This was frequently done in offices back in olden times.

Zenst 5y ago

> Personally, I pretty much never answer calls from unknown numbers, unless I am specifically expecting a call (eg: from a service company coming to the house, or calling back about an inquiry I made). That is my personal choice, alas many Doctors, government departments, companies etc etc alas withhold there numbers and a right PITA it is as well. This is in the UK.

satronaut 5y ago

yeah, outside of a tech job people still heavily rely on phone calls to get their jobs done. Sales, HR, field services, etc all call people directly since a text message could be missed for hours. And a lot of stuff is still based on legacy systems (manually inputing info or hand writing records)

ta1234567890 5y ago

Pretty much everyday I get 5+ spam calls, almost all from numbers with area codes in Texas (no idea why). The calls start at 7:30am. My number is in the federal do not call list. I used to manually block every single number from spam calls, but now I gave up. I’ll just never answer a call unless it’s from a known number and I’m expecting it. Otherwise I’ll just return it later if it’s important enough. My guess is that phone network operators don’t care because they haven’t figured out a way to make money blocking these calls. At the same time, the same carriers are going out of their way to block text messages from businesses that legitimately use services like Twilio to communicate with their users/customers. Why? Because the alternative for these businesses is to pay about $3k setup fee + $3k/quarter to get a shortcode for the privilege of texting the carriers customers - the same customers the carriers don’t care about protecting from spam phone calls.

coldcode 5y ago
I fill up my voicemail ever week, 99% of them from the area code of my phone, which is 1500 mi from where I live now, and all are spam. I wish I could just block an area code.
- gregmac 5y ago
  I use Calls Blacklist [1] to block calls from unrecognized numbers -- just checked, it supports blocking numbers based on "Starts with" so that would probably work, if you're on Android. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladlee.easyblacklist&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladlee.ea...

stickfigure 5y ago

My phone doesn't even ring if the # isn't in my contact list. Just goes straight to voicemail. Easy to do with Android "Do Not Disturb" rules. Yeah, the "Telephone" app is the worst feature on my phone.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Yeah, the "Telephone" app is the worst feature on my phone. ... I have just devised the perfect marketing pitch for the pinephone. (Yes, I know calls are working these days; work with me here)

Trias11 5y ago

I totally agree on the point that any random individual trying to inflict "sync" voice interaction on anyone deserves to be ignored for good. That said however gateway providers are consciously funneling malicious crap to citizens. And they ought to be held responsible for that by the law. This will fix the problem.

gambiting 5y ago

I just think this is uniquely American problem and for some reason American carriers are completely uninterested in dealing with it. Here in UK I get maybe....1 spam call every 3 months? If even that. And it's always the same robo-voice that you can recognize within 2 seconds and disconnect. I have absolutely no issues answering my phone.

arlcode 5y ago
Yeah same here in Germany. Zero ever on my mobile phone (and I know the number has been leaked by at least one breach). Maybe 1 per month on the landline of my parents and these days it's exclusively "Microsoft" trying to "fix" their computer (weirdly enough with an English speaking scammer). Either Germans are not a valuable target for "legit" companies or some regulation is working it's magic behind the scene.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  My feeling is that Americans are easier targets of fraud for technical and legal reasons. E.g. 'stealing someones identity' is a thing. Where I live, SSN and driver licenses are public record (you can get a photo copy of anyones driver license), so they are unusable for fax scams. Having a system built on such items being 'secret' is probably a culprit.
- distances 5y ago
  I've been thinking that what probably helps too is the fact all German speaking countries are wealthy. Much harder to build a spam center with human callers.
  - arlcode 5y ago
    Could be that. On the other hand some (legitimate) support call centers are located in Eastern Europe so it's possible to find enough German speakers there (although not native ones).
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Either Germans are not a valuable target for "legit" companies or some regulation is working it's magic behind the scene. IIUC, telecoms in DE charge the originator of the call for call completion, while in the US, telecoms charge the originator and the recipient. As such, US telecoms have a vested interest in completing scam/spam calls while that is not the case in DE. I may be misunderstanding this, so if someone more knowledgeable could comment I'd appreciate it.

KZerda 5y ago

I started answering scam calls. And pressing 1 when it said so to speak with someone about my microsoft account, apple account, car warranty, etc. And telling the person on the other end to kindly fuck off. After a few rounds of this, the calls stopped calling, as I'd gotten on enough of the spammer blacklists of someone who will waste their time. It took a while to build up the courage to do so, but I'm glad I did, because when the phone rings now, I can be reasonably assured that it's someone who I actually want to talk to.

bluGill 5y ago
Do one better, get their contact info and then sue. They are all breaking some law, so once you have their info it is easy to win in court. You pretty much need to be a lawyer to pull the above off.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Do one better, get their contact info and then sue. They are all breaking some law, so once you have their info it is easy to win in court. Since most scam/spam calls have spoofed caller iD, how do you obtain such contact information? Do tell. I have time on my hands, so I'd love to take this route.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    They need to give you information on how to send your payment that works, so you need to lead them on until they give you that information. Once you have that you have a place that really exists, and courts can go from there.
    - speedybird 5y ago
      They tell you to buy a bunch of gift cards at the grocery store and then read the number off the card over the phone. How do you successfully sue them with that information?
    - nobody9999 5y ago

the__alchemist 5y ago

I do. If it's an unknown number, it's probably someone from work not on my contacts list trying to coordinate someone.

afarrell 5y ago

> I don't know if society as a whole is there yet, but I think it's basically rude to expect you can just interrupt someone at any point and demand their direct attention to have a synchronous voice conversation with you. This is why I drifted away from my friends and family until I set up an account on https://calendly.com/ https://calendly.com/ where they could book time to talk with me.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

One of the many things I despise about the NHS’s (UK universal health system) bureaucracy is that for some brain-dead reason they insist on calling on withheld numbers. I’ve been conditioned into ignoring withheld numbers by years of scammers, spammers, and even a nutty ex who’d use it to try getting around my call blocking. They also seem to have call waiting systems designed to be as frustrating as possible so people give up and just suffer with their ailments without deigning to bother the NHS about them. I’m so glad the world seems to be slowly adopting a policy of “text before call” even if a few family members have picked up an irritating habit of using recorded voice messages rather than texting (I disabled my voicemail a decade ago for a reason). It should be considered rude to call people without warning them I think.

mech422 5y ago

>>texting is faster and better than voicemail. Personally, I find voice coms higher bandwidth and overall faster then texting/email. And email with sorting, filtering and searching capabilities is miles better then texting for me.

AndyMcConachie 5y ago

People outside of the United States also read HN. I answer my phone here in The Netherlands. I understand how bad it is in the US, but don't assume HN is just US.

krageon 5y ago

> How many HN readers actually answer their phones anymore? Everyone that works for a large company and has any kind of corporation-spanning responsibility. Phone calls are almost always the last fallback if someone really needs to reach you for something critical.

wildrhythms 5y ago
I used to work in IT. We had a system where every call would be sent to voicemail- "Please briefly describe the issue, and let us know how to contact you."- and would arrive in .mp3 attachment in an email inbox. Within 15 minutes someone would listen to the voicemail, transform it into a regular written ticket, and prioritize the issue that way. We never needed someone chain-linked to a phone receiver.
- krageon 5y ago
  This is how you woke someone up at night if you need to figure out why a specific server is given some arcane error? I can't imagine it is, this is a system for during the day not so critical time. And for that it's probably great (at the very least it's cool!).

matheusmoreira 5y ago

I don't answer the phone anymore. I don't think I ever did to begin with. I hate phones. I have a subscription because it's impossible to get mobile internet without it and nearly all mobile software uses phone numbers for identification and authentication. Wish I could turn off the calls. I don't want people to call me! I want people to message me. It used to be easy to ignore. Now with all these automated calls the system has become unusable and unbearable. Every single day I get at least 5 automated calls and my phone always thinks they're the most important things in the world, worthy of my immediate attention and warranting the interruption of anything I'm doing. It makes me wish I could delete the telephony app without breaking the phone! That's what phones are, most fundamentally. They're human interrupts. When I call people, I'm interrupting them in order to make them talk to me. There's this underlying assumption that the call is more important than anything. People will ignore other humans in front of them in order to answer calls! Hard to think of anything more disrespectful. That may have been tolerable back then when phones were the best technology we had but they've been obsolete ever since asynchronous messaging became a thing. Why can't phones just disappear? What's keeping them alive? I have lots of family with landlines. Older people who still think of phone lines as something valuable just because they used to be worth a ton of money decades ago. 95%+ of the calls they receive are nothing but a waste of their time. Banks offering them credit cards, loans, scammers. Yet they keep those lines around "just in case"! I simply can't fathom putting up with an advertiser who's brash enough to actually interrupt me with a phone call. That's an unfathomable level of abuse to me.

wildrhythms 5y ago
James Fisher's article titled 'I hate telephones' resonates so strongly with me on this topic: https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/ https://jameshfisher.com/2017/11/08/i-hate-telephones/ (see also the associated HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677560) You are 100% right- they are human interrupts that we're all subjected to just by virtue of forcing to interact with people and companies who refuse to use an asynchronous medium of communication. Horrifying
- matheusmoreira 5y ago