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Comment by andrew_ | Hacker News Reader

This is especially problematic as Twitter doesn't allow people to use numbers from Google Voice and other digital phone number services.

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This is common practice, as a mobile number can be a good signal for determining whether or not an account is a bot; blocking virtual numbers means any would-be fake accounts need to find a dealer for good non-voip numbers, likely increasing the cost of creating these accounts.

Yeah, good thing too. Wouldn’t want Twitter to be overrun with bots.

Which is so terrible. They're proving again and again that virtual numbers (or generally any proxy for PII) are the only ones that they can be trusted with.

Well, it's clearly not working since there are millions of bot accounts.

How does that prove it's not working?

Is this a serious question?

If your justification for requiring non-VOIP numbers is "it decreases the number of bots on the service" and the service is overrun with bots, clearly requiring non-VOIP numbers hasn't done much of anything to decrease the number of bots.

Just because a service isn't overrun with bots already doesn't mean it couldn't be 10x worse to the point where twitter becomes usable if existing mechanism like blocking non-VOIP numbers didn't exist. If they got rid of that constraint I could easily spin up a million bot accounts (captcha bypass is trivial) if I wanted to.

I only killed 10 people, officer, not 100; therefore, I'm not a criminal.

The justification for wearing seatbelts is they save lives in a crash and yet fatal car crashes are common. Does this prove seatbelts don’t work?

Its an interesting problem, is the real reason to use this as you have to pay to get a phone so is less likely to be a bot. I'd rather use GV or similar and avoid the risk of hacking my phone company account.

I can spend $2 to get a number on a website that will pass anything, including Google itself. Not going to name the site but it's not exactly difficult to locate

Too many copycats, never found such site.

Is it a shared number?

if it's the same one i'm thinking of, the number is shared in the sense that you can buy a verification for google while someone else can buy a verification code for twitter on the same number.

iirc they had a guarantee that the number won't be reused for the same service for at least 6 months from order.

Is this ^^^ grey cause it's wrong or cause it silly?

They are right, but people really hate to give out their real phone number - especially since they get leaked this way and then abused, so in the end they have the bot problem.

It's entirely correct. Note that the comment doesn't claim it stops all bot traffic, just that it increases the cost of creating fake accounts. Nor does it make any judgment on the morality or efficacy of such measures. People likely downvote such comments because they're reading something into it that isn't actually there.

Trying to justify not letting people do what they can to protect their phone number on an article about a data breach that leaked phone numbers - yeah, you're gonna get downvoted.

>Twitter doesn't allow people to use numbers from Google Voice

Untrue.

Source: my Twitter account uses a Google voice number.

How old is your account?

I certainly use a GV number

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