Hacker News Reader

Comment by noasaservice | Hacker News Reader

Is it still going to require to deanonymize yourself with a real cell phone number? As opposed to a virtual phone# like GVoice, Trello, etc?

View on HN

Why require any phone number? I hate Twitter and won't use it either way, but they have no business asking for phone numbers.

Have you tried making any accounts online these days without a phone number? Good luck — there are extremely few services left that allow it due to “abuse” and other nonsense.

My favorite case of this is that you used to be able to create a google account through android without a phone number. Assuming this is still possible, if you do this your account will be immediately suspended for “suspicious activity” and require a phone to unlock.

I use one service that requires a phone number: Signal. I'm doing alright on the internet. If your service requires a phone number to sign up, I will not use it, period. If more people thought like me this would be a problem, but the majority seems hell bent on spreading their cheeks for peanuts these days.

If you hate twitter so much, then respectfully, why are you commenting? This post is exclusively about Twitter and Tor.

So people are only allowed to be positive on topics? I don't think HN got that memo.

Don't open a Tesla, Facebook, or crypto article, you'll be shocked to see how many people hate those things and are commenting anyway!

Not OP but my 2 cents:

"Hate" / "Dislike" / Critical Post / Negative comment, is just as valid as "Love" / "Like" / Positive Comment. Either may be productive (constructive feedback or earned support) or unproductive (pointless criticism as much as baseless love).

In fact, as owner of any service/product/store, constructive negative feedback is valuable. My wife is a store manager and subscribes to "Feedback is a gift" philosophy - is a customer is going to leave, she'd appreciate knowing, in constructive way, why they are leaving.

There's a general tone of commentary here that it's good that Twitter is accepting Tor connections. I think that's a good thing. There's also a lot of side-commentary about how Twitter shouldn't be overly-praised for this because they follow plenty of other dark patterns, most notably requiring a login and collecting phone numbers and other personal information. The main reason I hate Twitter is because of their dark patterns (and shitty UI). If they stopped collecting phone numbers, I'd hate them less.

Originally Twitter was over SMS. That's why Tweets were limited to 140 characters; it's all you could fit. So they did have a reason to ask for phone numbers from the beginning.

Ok but now, what feels like a 100 years later, they don't anymore. It's just another data point to identify users and sell that information eventually.

And today the hard requirement is???

Money. They want money.

I tried to create an account a few months ago with virtual phone numbers since I don't want to give it my real one. Every attempt was rejected

use a proxy, a new chrome session, and throwaway email address.

But what about the phone number?

most twitter accounts do not have a phone attached to it. you must be doing something to trip up the phone verification thing

They're typically required. Even if you manage to create an account without a phone number, you'll soon start get notifications from Twitter saying that your account is at risk and you have to add your phone for verification (at least that's what happened to a friend of mine who set up an account some time last year)

It's possible to create a twitter account without a phone number. You'll initially get suspended and get an email stating why. Just reply to that email (open a ticket) and they will approve the account without a phone number.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com