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Comment by aboringusername | Hacker News Reader

> but I suppose most people are not really traumatised by merely seeing someone's name

I mean there are cases where that can be devastating.

"Ohai here's your old abusive ex, here's a chat box just for good measure, good luck!".

There are people who I'd never ever want to be within a textbox and tap away from accessing me, for any reason, period.

You can get restraining orders in the physical world, the digital world however has no boundaries when the apps themselves are too stupid and are defined by real-world-illogical programming code. I wouldn't expect an app to understand a 'court order' but that's a real human construct. How do we design against that in the digital space, when you are so accessible that if you have a crazy dude following you you're basically forced to retreat as there's no effective measures/guards against this?

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Well, a couple of things:

(a) You can't take seeing their name, but you keep them in your contacts? Don't you occasionally scroll past it with a call button right there, which is just as easy to hit and put you in touch with them? How is this any different? Seems a bit silly.

(b) As far as I know, research suggests hyper-avoidance is not a good way to resolve trauma. So I'm not convinced by the idea that this is harmful, especially when you can control it through (a).

A contact list often operates as a database of what number belongs to who, for guarding incoming calls. It can be a security tool.

You can generally block calls by number, without having them as a named contact.

I do see Waterluvian's point though. You might still have business with them yet you don't really want to deal with them otherwise. Knowing who this SMS or call was from can be helpful rather than blocking the number outright.

Then again, seeing their name when installing Signal and figuring "oh hey they have signal too" seems no less weird to me than seeing their name in my phone book and thinking "oh hey they have a phone too". If that really sets you off... that seems unlikely. So I don't really get this subthread, even if I see the general point that you might not want to be reminded of certain people on a regular basis (for me, installing a phone number-based social application is not a monthly occurrence).

In iOS and Android, incoming call blocks are in a separate database and explicitly not the contacts database.

Why do you have the authority to dismiss many's experience of a feature? Because you can think of a way you would handle it and you've read some things?

Because we're all here talking about how things should be designed, which often inherently requires fulfilling some needs at the expense of others? Not quite sure how you expect those decisions to be made without people gathering to discuss the relative merits of each approach.

If you're about to tell me we should just implement every user request that they claim is of 10/10 importance to them personally, then I'm not even sure what to tell you. Have you taken all of a few seconds to consider what happens when two people make conflicting requests? Then we're back to evaluating things and discussing them again. How arrogant of us.

I appreciate the implied authority you've given yourself to be the conversation police, though.

Even if you don't keep them in your contacts, the connection tracking can be problematic if they keep you in their contacts.

"But what if you didn’t give Clubhouse access to your contacts, specifically because you didn’t want all or any of them to know you were there? I regret to inform you that Clubhouse has made it possible for them to know anyway, encourages them to follow you, and there isn’t much you can do about it... I got followers who weren’t in my contacts at all — but I was in theirs."

https://www.vox.com/recode/22278601/clubhouse-invite-privacy...

> You can't take seeing their name, but you keep them in your contacts?

If I start getting abusive calls or texts from a usual suspect, I want to know who it is. My carrier-level number blocking resets every couple of years, and I cannot remember everyone's phone numbers.

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