The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007 | Hacker News Reader

The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007

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68 pointsHooke89 comments

I think this is another example of popularity and commoditization eventually destroying something.

First, telephones start out as expensive, only available in big cities. I'm not old enough to remember this, but I suspect it would have been an exclusive and prestigious club.

Eventually, telephones get widespread, and cheaper - I'm thinking like mid 90s, before mobile phones became mass market. This was "peak telephone", and it's what I remember from my youth. It was actually pretty good! As the author says, you could casually call your friends without seeming intrusive or clingy, and you could call most business or government agencies and talk to staff, getting quick responses to inquiries from knowledgeable people. Towards the end of this era, you have lots of information lines for time, weather, movies, phone banking services, etc.

Around this time, call centers are introduced - if you call a business or government agency, you don't end up talking to some knowledgeable subject matter expert about some topic, you talk to a call center operator who has a script, and if it's anything non-trivial, tries to transfer you, call back, or generally mess you around.

At this point, the phone network is so cheap, with so many subscribers that the temptation to abuse it to sell things to people is irresistible. Robo-dialling, answering machines, caller ID, and the Do Not Call registry are all introduced to the system, in a nuisance call arms race between callers and callees.

The call centers go to India, and the Philippines. The call center operators get placed behind a interactive voice response system (IVR). Now, it's pretty much impossible to get anything useful done by phone. Landlines are disconnected, people have voice numbers on their mobile devices, but refuse to answer calls from numbers that aren't in their address book.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the fundamental nature of communications networks - the story isn't much different for postal mail, fax, email, usenet, facebook. Success seems to kill the network in the end.

> but refuse to answer calls from numbers that aren't in their address book.

I do that. If I don't know the number and that person really wants to talk to me, there is my answer machine where he/she can leave a message. I will never answer a call from a number I do not know, whatever the reason. If it is urgent, the person has to leave a message, so I can call him/her back. Why ? because I get spammed X times a day with numbers from unknown origins. The worst is masked numbers off course.

I once got a call from a masked number where the guy was trying to scam me by telling me his "friend" was going to kill my brother unless I sent him some money. I didn't fall for it (the only credible info he had was stuff I told him), but it made me wary of unlisted numbers.

Personally I think masked numbers should be phased out entirely.

I had a series of spam calls a year or two ago where the caller's number was the same area code and first three digits as mine. At one point I even got a call from an irate Mexican woman who claimed I'd just made one of these calls to her. I guess the telemarketers figured out people are more likely to answer calls that look like they'really local, even if they don't recognize the number, and they had some way of spoofing it.

So, it isn't actually success that kills the network, it's just the spammers. What else is new.

One could argue that it's success (i.e. it's popularity and commoditization) is what created the spammers.

Be wary of assuming that answer machines will be used. I'm 26 and I've never used an answer machine. Maybe accidentally. I'm probably not going to leave you a message because really few people listens to the message. I'm certainly not going to listen to a message someone leaves me. This is what SMS is for, I think.

I don't comprehend the thinking behind not listening to voicemails. Why have a voicemail box, then? You're just making anybody who does leave a voicemail think you're ignoring them on purpose. Is it people who didn't purposefully purchase and setup the voicemail feature, but it was automatically enabled?

Some operators have it as default - that's how I got one before. I think operators have stopped doing this now, at least where I live, so it's not a problem anymore.

I think telephones were plentiful and cheap from about the 1950s on. The technology (at least from a customer perspective) really plateaued from then until the early 90s.

When I was a kid, people did not own phones. They could only rent them from AT&T. I remember going with my family to buy our own phone (after that became legal). The FCC's Resale and Shared Use decision is a good read:

http://etler.com/FCC/pdf/CC/CC%2080-54/FCC%2080-607.pdf

As another note, I recently read that several hundred thousand Americans still rent landline phones from the phone company.

https://consumerist.com/2012/04/30/hundreds-of-thousands-of-...

> Unfortunately, this seems to be the fundamental nature of communications networks - the story isn't much different for postal mail, fax, email, usenet, facebook. Success seems to kill the network in the end.

Actually, for a variety of reasons I think postal mail is going to be around for a long, long time, which is interesting since it predated the telephone. It could very well morph into "pick up from your local mail depot" for some people though.

Not sure what the author is on about.

In the B2B world at least, phone remains customers' preferred way to get more info prior to a sale and to get support afterwards. The same for B2C - at least on the support end of things, and provided you can readily talk to a human.

Also, analog phone calls are dead. But voice conversations are here to stay IMHO. There are plenty of "non-phone" alternatives to do those, e.g. Skype or using /call in Slack to sort out in 3-5 min what would take 15+ min to sort out in writing using texts or chats. Voice is just faster.

Voice is just faster.

As someone who grew up more immersed in the digital world than the average, I want to point out that this isn't a universal truth. With practice, concise and clear text can convey more accurate and more useful information than a low-SNR vocal conversation.

Which is too much to ask from the average person.

You've added an extraneous variable. Nobody's saying that you can't be more unclear on a telephone than through an email or text. The difference between "concise and clear" and "low-SNR" is definitional, no matter what the media is.

You don't phone someone for a simple message, you do it because you know a back-and-forth conversation is needed. Which is always significantly faster than text.

If there is back and forth required then voice just isn't the way to go. It's too fast for that. This is why email always wins out over voice.

This is just not true. If you've ever worked remote and need to work through a problem there is nothing faster then getting on the phone and doing a screen share just as if you were face to face.

I respectfully disagree. Nothing feels like a greater waste of time when working remotely than when someone can't be bothered to think about their problem enough to ask via text and demands a phone call. Maybe it's just the teams I've worked with, but voice calls almost invariably end up as 99% noise, taking forever for people to figure out what they actually want to ask and never getting to the point.

Synchronous voice communication is much higher bandwidth than text. Probably by an order of magnitude. And it allows nuance (tone, inflection, emotion) that is not possible with pure text (kind of like how emoji adds a dimension to text that isn't really possible in its absence). Surely you can imagine topics that could benefit from this increased bandwidth, no?

I can imagine such topics, but nearly none of them occur in a software development workplace. As I said before, it has been my experience that the extra bandwidth of a voice channel is nearly always wasted. IMO the best case for voice calls as a developer is brief daily status/standup meetings, and you've probably seen how many people around here dislike those.

I think what's really going on is that people who grew up analog don't see textual decisionmaking as "real", and need a familiar voice call to make things feel "official".

I have to disagree. I will have been working remotely for 5 years in November. Yes, there is a time and place for getting on the phone, like for last resort trouble shooting; but that is really a small part of communication in my experience. When initial trouble shooting, architecting, planning, or negotiating you need that time to investigate and consider your response.

For me, my team is mostly +15 or +8 hours from me. So relying on voice is just impractical.

It's not about transferred information fidelity, it's about short feedback loops, the ability to interrupt, and the knowledge (on both sides) of attention.

Since concise and clear statements can be made in both media, the difference is entirely in the limitations of the transport medium, and written text lacks all of the characteristics I earlier mentioned.

The ability to interrupt is what I most dislike about voice. IRC/IM/Slacj/HipChat/whatever can provide just as short of a feedback cycle, and people can be inattentive in voice calls as well, which is a greater waste of time due to their synchronous nature.

The numbers used here don't really make the case. A text message is a conversation element, a call is a conversation.

I spent 4 hours on the phone Friday, on 5 calls. I also sent a couple dozen texts. According to the article, I'm not a phone user.

> The numbers used here don't really make the case.

I got that impression too. I think a better metric would be minutes spent talking compared to text messages sent. Even then, I can talk about a lot more in a minute of voice than I can in even five minutes of texting, given the lag between messages.

The article is riding the line between absurdity and parody.

I've found that phone is far more effective at resolving disagreements than email/text. For serious disagreements, meeting face to face for a beer works best.

Many disagreements arise out of people misinterpreting the tone of emails and texts. Phone at least conveys voice tone. Face-to-face gives the whole shebang, including body language. I never have conversations on hazardous topics without at least a phone call, and then only if the other person is too remote to meet face-to-face.

I've found that phone is far more effective at resolving disagreements than email/text.

People who are better at talking in person tend to feel this way. Others are better at emailing (I am like this, it gives me time to clarify my thoughts, and delete the petty insults), and think the opposite.

The only time I prefer to see face-to-face is when I need to build a relationship of trust with the person, and it's easier for some people (like you) to see that I am not ripping them off.

I'm the exact same way. Thank you for expressing why I prefer email to calls or face to face meetings so succinctly.

People who are better at emailing often overestimate how good other people are at reading emails.

This is a far bigger problem than some here might think. I write emails now on the assumption that the recipient might read the first two sentences, skim the first two paragraphs, and ignore the rest.

They should teach this in business school. I never write my boss an email more than three sentences long. I never ask two questions in one email, unless I don't mind one of them being ignored.

Surely they do teach just that?

Whenever I write a report I always put the summary first because that is all that anyone who trusts me needs to read. The rest is supporting information and extended arguments in favour of the proposition that I make in the summary together with some notes about why alternatives are no good.

Of course, I never went to business school, I'm an engineer who started as a physicist.

You are expressing that you prefer talking on the phone. That is fine.

No, I think they are expressing the idea that people who are fluent enough with the language to prefer written over in-person communication might not fully appreciate the extremely poor reading comprehension of the general population.

I say this as somebody who used to prefer written communication. But I have come to realize that it is necessary to ask your audience, "Does that make sense?" after every major and minor point, and then listen to them reformulate what you just told them to make sure they actually got it.

So.....you are someone who prefers to talk on the phone.

You know, I couldn't have provided a better example of the exact phenomenon I was talking about. Thank you.

"For serious disagreements, meeting face to face for a beer works best."

I like your style, Walter.

A typical short phone call has a few items of back & forth equal to a good number of texts. So for text to surpass phone calls, I think the ratio needs to be much higher than 1:1, maybe something like 8:1. So the "death" date gets pushed further out, but it's still there somewhere.

I agree that mobile voice quality is terrible on most phones, especially when people choose to make their calls on speakerphone for some reason. At work we have landlines and actual desk phones with hard-wired headsets because the call quality is amazing compared to mobile. It lets you have a fully nuanced, tonal, relaxed conversation with everything but the facial expressions and hand gestures.

> especially when people choose to make their calls on speakerphone for some reason

You make it sound so mysterious. Speaking for myself, I do it for long conversations because it's actually painful to keep the phone held to my ear for that long.

Phones used to be shaped so it was comfortable to do so. It was quite a useful feature.

Maybe someone will come out with an ergonomic cellphone and do some mad Columbussing in that area. "You pockets aren't flat, your face isn't flat; stop using a flat slab as a phone!" The marketing writes itself.

Actually, that was almost exactly the marketing slogan for Nokia 8110, the "banana", released in 1996.

Even at the time of Ericsson Dialog (standard issue phone around here from 1960's to 1980's) it was not comfortable to hold the phone for a long time.

First of all, just to keep your hand raised up for an extended period of time is tiring. Even without any weight. (Modern phones are actually lighter than the Dialog handle was. )

Secondly, for many people, it is not convenient to touch the ear for a long time with any object.

Yeah, I can't abide using an actual handset for more than the shortest calls, a headset is so much better - for a landline, or even a mobile.

That works for many people, but I couldn't wear a headset all day, either. Somehow burns my ears after a while. A speakerphone is my choice. Of course, at works that requires I have my own office room, not open office...

Yes! I have many times complained about what happened to phone ergonomics. It started with cordless phones. The old corded handsets had a nice design with a deep cup for your ear, and they were pleasant to talk on. The cordless phones were bricks, and as often as not the earpiece actually stuck out a bit. Very uncomfortable, and of course with the size requirements of cell phones it's gotten even worse.

On the contrary, it's now cheap and simple to use a mic on a pair of headphones and be completely free of any burden.

You can get an old-style handset for your cellphone for $4, though. No point in complaining.

I find the same, but cheap Bluetooth headsets have got really good, which is another way to fix this.

An advantage of text is that you can broadcast not to multiple people. My friends have a Whatsapp group where we coordinate or ask general questions.

Also you can send audio recordings in a text message. I think I once read on hn that in some crazy asian country that is the main method of communication: they don't text, they don't call, they send each other voice mails.

As far as phone quality goes,

    cell < landline < skype

For me, having a conversation on a cell takes some effort, and it's tiring. A conversation via landline is much more comfortable, and skype is best. This is all due to the voice quality.

Lots of cell carriers are starting to do HD voice with VoLTE. It's definitely helped a bit, but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of crosscarrier compatibility.

I like Skype or Hangouts. I think the latency is a lot lower. When I'm on the cell, I feel like I'm always talking over people.

Cell phone quality hasn't improved since my first cell phone in the early 90's. Everything else is far better but that.

Also, voice transmission only happens when the phone detects a voice, and this has the effect of clipping off the very first part of your sentence. I'd find this highly irritating, but I've noticed it a lot less in the last few years. Perhaps that has been fixed.

The killer feature of non-telephone voice services like Skype/GotoMeeting/etc is that it shows you who is speaking. It's a small thing, but it makes a huge difference.

I'm not writing it off yet.

More of my friends are calling than in 2007 when it was texting, IM and then the mass rush to Facebook. Quite a few are now cutting down Facebook, a couple have left completely.

Maybe it's an age thing, but I find a 30 min call much more effective at "topping up the friendship" than any number of minutes online chat. I had a very early ICQ, and no end of IM since, but since smart phones the fragmentation has got so ridiculous I rarely bother. I think I'd need to install about 10 with 2-5 contacts in each to cover most and miss everyone using iMessage of course (never did understand why Apple didn't release for multiple platforms).

They didn't support multiple platforms for the same reason Blackberry's BBM was a Blackberry exclusive; platform lock-in. I have iMessage and I love using it with people I text regularly. It still works for SMS, but it's a degraded experience. There are tons of other options now, but I still use iMessage the most since it's the best-integrated messenger on iOS, and they'll keep it that way with things like private APIs + total control over the App Store.

I wish instead of lasers and magic ink Apple would add group chat iMessage (and conference calls to Facetime).

Group chat is already there since iOS 5 in the very beginning.

I'd like it if audio were on the way up. On WhatsApp I send lots of audio messages but the amount I get back in return is small. It's so much easier to hit record than to try and type on a tiny virtual keyboard. Text is great for my laptop, short or long audios, for my phone. No calls, though.

Actually, I find audio messages more like writing, in that one can think about what they want to say and there's no pressure to say something "right this moment", as with a telephone call. Likewise, the person receiving the audio message can listen to it when it suits them.

Same here. I moved abroad and everyone here uses whatsapp. Voice recordings are extremely common and popular.

I just wish slack added the same feature, so I can drop a recording into a channel, instead of typing a wall of text.

I have my Nokia still going strong; but sadly they're killing the last GSM network in Canada next year and I won't have anything to connect it to. I like telephone calls a lot of the time, I use them about as often as text messages.

Next year I might need to buy a phone which is about 12 times as expensive, has worse signal reliability, and which has a battery which will last me literally one 14th the time my current one does, and which will take up about twice the space in my pocket, and it will be a shattering liability every time I take it with me. All the while, it will have so much software on it and so much attack surface that I will need to stay abreast of hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes of updates twice a month (at least) just so that people don't commit fraud with my identity.

Seriously, screw this noise, get me out of here.

Or you could just get another dumbphone: http://www.rogers.com/web/link/wirelessBuyFlow?forwardTo=Pho...

People report a lot of battery issues for those. I'd probably want a Nokia.

Well then get a new Nokia dumbphone: https://www.microsoft.com/en/mobile/phones/all#order_by=late....

"sadly they're killing the last GSM network in Canada next year"

Source?

Somebody is using phones to make calls. Usually it's the guy in the big Chevy SUV behind me weaving from side to side on the carriageway. If phone calls were really dying I wouldn't see so many parents pulling out of school dropoff with a phone clamped to their ear. Who are these people calling? Each other? Or are they all answering calls from robodiallers?

Interestingly, I worked at a Telco from 2011-2015, granted, a rural one in North America.

In all honesty, without a shadow of a lie, the master strategy of the VP of Technology was to get a fax line into every home and business....... in 2015.

Oh yes, they really can be that clueless.

Fax is still a growth market in the US, or at least was as late as last year if a chap in that market I interacted with then is anything to go by. He was working on a fax sending API. The stuff couldn't go by signed email or anything of the sorts because of some administrative and (medical) insurance related paperwork if memory serves.

That's a feature of the absurdity of compliance checkboxes.

If the auditor is an idiot, you can get a moderate finding for doing things like applying a security patch that isn't FIPS validated, or similar nonsense.

That seems like a ridiculously narrow use. Fax is not a growing industry.

I think the author tries too hard to make his point. If I have a chat with someone and send thirty messages he's counting that as thirty conversations vs one phone call.

A much fairer way is to look at how many times you speak with your friends via text vs calling them. I find that I have many small text conversations but when we get together by phone it's usually a long conversation of thirty minutes or more.

I do not think the telephone call is going away. When a majority of smart phones sold only allow texting is when I will believe it. I do think that the landline phone sadly is going to become an endangered species, I will regret losing mine it's my secret weapon.

That's the most hyperbole I've ever seen in a single article. I had to stop reading when I got to "The final voice mail that anybody actually heard was recorded sometime around 2009". I get that it was meant as a joke, like much of the exaggeration in the piece, but it's just too much.

I didn't send my first text until 2008, but once I did, voice calls were dead to me.

Yet another article whining about kids these days.

Good riddance. Telephone calls are awful.

2007 was also, incidentally, the last time I had a telephone that actually functioned decently as a telephone - the venerable Nokia brickphone. Since then, I've had nothing but grief with terrible signal, mics and speakers that cut out intermittently, and antennas that cannot pick up towers that are in line-of-sight with smartphones. They are, however, lovely for doing email and texting, which have the additional benefit of leaving behind a persistent paper trail so that there is an actual record of what is said that can be referred to later.

>leaving behind a persistent paper trail so that there is an actual record of what is said that can be referred to later./< Isn't this sometimes a good reason to make phone calls?

Fortunately I'm not involved in anything shady that would make records of that kind a liability. Good thing, too; I've got terrible auditory memory, half the time things I hear just go poof into the ether 30 seconds later without lodging anywhere in my brain.

> Fortunately I'm not involved in anything shady that would make records of that kind a liability.

Be careful with "nothing to hide" arguments. All else aside, sometimes it's nice to voice a frustrated opinion about a person without creating a permanent record.

Note that more and more phone systems record every call.

The ephemeral nature of a voice call is not only an advantage for questionable activities.

You can defuse a potential conflict by voice call because the medium allows airing of issues in a more candid fashion, and allows more rapid convergence onto common ground compared to text based communication.

I think that bad news is best communicated along channels that allow some kind of non-verbal perception (on a phone call largely by judging the nature and length of the silences). Face to face is best, but synchronous voice communication is a second best.

Not sure how common this is outside of the valley, but Google Hangouts and other video conferencing solutions work pretty well too. Maybe not so much Hangouts because the video quality is terrible, but it + chromebox for meetings is so much cheaper than previous solutions which required 8u of rack space for a video processor and server that it's totally worth it.

That can be a good thing! As noxious as a conference call is, a drawn out mailing list battle is far worse.

Those situations are so common at Microsoft that they put a button in Outlook specifically to mute those threads.

"Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink." -- Martin Lomasney

In a business context, I try to route substantive communications through email (or, if internal, through systems like Slack). There's nothing like a searchable corpus to minimize ambiguity, commemorate who said what, and when, and in response to which questions.

Likewise, there's a certain kind of project counterparty who inevitably tries to drive substantive communications through phone calls -- specializing in the dreaded dozen-person multi-time-zone conference call, featuring the ever-popular ten-minute parade of welcome tones, "who just joined?", and mystery attendees. These email-avoiders are the ones for whom calls are a tacit means of trying to project power, and ambiguity is a project management feature, not a bug, bound up with their own personal risk management strategy.

You probably know the type: when asked a detailed question by email that requires a specific and accountable response, they reply "Let's set up a call. -- Sent from my iPhone".

N.B. I like iPhones just fine, but please, turn off that sig.

Yeah, especially embarrassing if you work in tech and can't be arsed to turn off the email signature ads for your hip new mail client. I really don't like that many mobile email apps do this by default now. If your email app is significantly better than mobile outlook, I'll tell people about it myself.

I get the frustration, but there are many situations where a searchable corpus of your deliberation process is a liability. This is especially true if there there are multiple stakeholders with varying positions.

That said, there is typically no intelligence behind 95% of conference calls with more than 5 parties.

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