Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com