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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> With the growing number of people working remotely from anywhere

It's growing, but it's still tiny. Most companies doing this are willing to lose users who don't have permanent phone numbers in order to gain a quick, easy, semi-reliable way to prevent fake account registrations.

> Stick to emails. People barely ever change their emails.

This is factually wrong. People get married, get divorced, change employers, graduate from school, etc. Email addresses change a lot.

Your suggestion also misunderstands (or ignores) the entire point of requiring phone numbers. They're not as easy to register as email addresses, so you're more likely to get a 1:1 relationship between phone numbers and individuals.

I could literally go out right now and activate quadrillions of valid email addresses within 20 min, and all of them would work. I can't do the same with phone numbers.

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Personal emails DO NOT change a lot. This is dishonest because they change extremely infrequently as a universal contact identifier.

I had an email startup. Emphasis on had. People are very reluctant to switch email providers and email addresses.

What may change more are business, affiliation, and ephemeral email addresses, but most people don't go around changing their personal email addresses like bathroom wallpaper.

Like I said, there are various life stages where your email address changes. A lot of people sign up for things with their employer-provided email address as well.

Phone numbers really only change when someone moves to a different country or absolutely can't port their number, which is rare these days. They change much less frequently than phone numbers change.

Source: API logs from an auto insurance backend that I maintain

I can get thousands of valid phone numbers for temporary use in 15 minutes. I’d say they are both about equal.

No one needs quadrillions of anything, thousands is enough to do 99% of tasks.

> I can get thousands of valid phone numbers

How?

Any VOIP DID provider with a provisioning API, like Twilio or Anveo.

I'd argue the infrastructure between phone numbers and e-mails are different enough that filtering for fake phone numbers is easier.

You can look up carrier data on a phone number easily enough, and if you're in the industry you have a general idea of which carriers are the ones that actually follow the rules for registering a number. You filter on the ones that don't.

But the point is, you wouldn’t be able to use any of them if the service wanted to block voip numbers. I went through a few providers because I wanted to see what was going on with Parler but didn’t want to share my real number.

Nothing worked.

> I can get thousands of valid phone numbers for temporary use in 15 minutes.

Not cheaply. Even on cheaper VoIP services, that would cost you $1,000+/month. Not a great price point if you're trying to spam something like a social network or post fake reviews, because each of your accounts is unlikely to generate enough to pay for the number.

Plus, many of the numbers will already be blacklisted because they're VoIP numbers or because they've been used for spam already.

> No one needs quadrillions of anything, thousands is enough to do 99% of tasks.

My point is that there are ~8 billion possible phone numbers in the US, when you account for reserved numbers. Many are already in use, many are blacklisted. Each costs $6-12/year to own through the major VoIP services.

There are essentially infinite email addresses, and each costs ~$0/year.

Which one do you want to use as a point of friction for signing up for your service?

And also people on networks that won’t deliver their providers messages. I can’t sign up for Twitter for example.

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