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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Except for when a restaurant is calling you to let you know that your table is ready.

Or your doctor's office is calling to let you know they suddenly have an opening this afternoon.

Or your Uber driver is calling to let you know you left something valuable in their car, right after they've dropped you off at the airport.

And so forth. I've learned from hard experience that silencing all calls from non-contacts bites you in the ass. There are legitimate calls that benefit you now, where going to voicemail defeats the purpose.

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To each their own, and everyone’s life has different complexities, but a decade of never answering a number I don’t know has yet to be a problem. A few times a year I’ll get a message from the doctor on my answering machine. That’s about it.

Generally they prey on people who cannot override their fear of missing out. It’s the “you may have already won!” trick in a different format.

Yeah. I’m willing to bet that the casual “so what if they can’t reach me” crowd don’t have elderly parents, kids, spouses, don’t put themselves in group trip situations where you don’t want to put everyone’s number in your permanent contacts, etc. No it’s pretty much idiocy to basically throw away voice calls because you get a usually obvious junk call now and then.

> I’m willing to bet that the casual “so what if they can’t reach me” crowd don’t have[...]

You'd be making a bad bet.

Besides, who is taking that stance? I don't answer my phone if the caller isn't in my phone book, but that doesn't mean legitimate unknown callers can't reach me! They leave a voice mail, and I'm listening to it immediately after they're done.

Because some things are urgent and I may not notice a straight to voicemail for a long time. I understand if junk calls are so frequent that some people are basically forced to ignore non-contact phone calls but it seems sub-optimal for the couple times a week situation which is my case.

> Because some things are urgent and I may not notice a straight to voicemail for a long time.

How so? My phone notifies me that the original call came in, and also notifies me that a voicemail was left. If I'm in a situation where I wouldn't notice a voicemail was left, I wouldn't notice the call in the first place anyway.

By default, calls ring or vibrate constantly so that you don't ignore them. Because they're intended for synchronous communication.

Notifications (including voicemails) are just a short ping, jumbled in with all your other notifications. Because they're intended for async communication.

So no, by design, your phone is meant for you to notice somebody calling more than a voicemail being left.

The latest iOS instantly transcribes voicemail. I find it handy to pick up the calll midway through. Just to be clear, I’ve used it exactly once so far. We’ll see how that goes.

> No it’s pretty much idiocy to basically throw away voice calls because you get a usually obvious junk call now and then.

Seems the other way to me and I would guess you’ve never tried it for any length of time. I get 4x as many junk calls as I get legit calls. If I don’t recognize your number, I send you to VM. My parents are elderly but they leave a message or send a text if I don’t answer. I add my doctors offices, city dispatcher, and similar numbers to my phone as soon as I learn them. It’s rarely a problem to hear a message and call back a few minutes later (except when they also don’t answer, in which case I leave a message and now have their number in my phone). Even works for large multi-location offices, who often show the same number no matter which is calling. My (adult) kids have been involved in emergencies and I see “City Dispatch” come up and I answer.

It’s just not a problem.

> If I don’t recognize your number, I send you to VM.

This is about silently rejecting all calls from non-contacts. You don't even know somebody tried to call, and any voicemail notification is easily lost among other e-mail and SMS and app notifications.

You're totally excluding your ability to respond to anything urgent unless you happen to check your voicemail notification at that very moment.

I'm glad your doctor calls all come from the same number -- mine don't at all. Nor do calls from delivery people asking where to safely leave a package, and so forth.

I'm glad it's not a problem for you -- I thought it wasn't a problem for me until it had negative consequences for me. So it's just to warn people, you know?

If you can’t figure out how to make your voicemail notification noticeable, why would you be able to notice a phone call better?

Because my phone rings and apparently unlike other people on this thread it’s usually a legit call and I can just let it drop to voicemail if it’s one of the relatively few obviously junk calls I get.

>You don't even know somebody tried to call

it's not. that's not how the iOS feature works. you still see it as a missed call, there's a notification saying it was rejected. it just doesn't ring.

The fact they think this shows they have no idea what they’re talking about.

This problem was solved when apple introduced ignore unknown callers.

They could improve on it slightly by allowing iOS apps access to breakthrough if they can prove its from an app somehow (like Uber or doordash), but really even that is an optimization not really needed.

For the phantom “what about my kid who’s phone is destroyed and is calling me from a strangers phone with seconds to live” you’d get the voicemail and multiple calls anyway.

That said, in recent years I’ve noticed a precipitous drop of these kinds of spam calls, so it may no longer be that big of an issue.

> For the phantom “what about my kid who’s phone is destroyed and is calling me from a strangers phone with seconds to live” you’d get the voicemail and multiple calls anyway.

No need to exaggerate -- this is about restaurants and doctors and deliveries, things that happen routinely -- not hostage situations you've pulled from the movies.

So no, you don't get multiple calls, and the voicemail notification is easily lost among 10 other notifications from the past half-hour. That's the whole point.

No, the problem was not solved by Apple.

I’m pretty old and I’ve been on silent unknowns for a few years.

I add lots of contacts. The iPhone also tracks if you’ve ever sent or received a real call. So it’s pretty easy to maintain.

The other day I had some contractors working in the house so I turned it off for a day.

With this on, I get zero spam. And I’m way better off than with it turned off and getting 10-15 daily spam calls.

The only situation you describe that actually would fit the “unknown callers” is the group trips.

Family are in my contacts, problem solved.

As for group trips, turn it off for that day(s) and turn it back on. Those, for most people, I would think would be pretty uncommon, and manually switching it off and back on is a much better solution than always having to deal with robo calls.

And I’m sure I would rarely remember and it’s not a wildly rare scenario for me. I admit I’m not deluged with junk but I’m not willing to roll over and make my phone significantly less useful because of some spammers.

Understanding that people can and do lead different lives than you is a skill worth developing. Different and idiot aren’t the same thing.

My doctor's office is in my phone book, so that's covered.

For things like restaurants, I know that I'll be receiving a call from an unknown number and will just answer it.

For unexpected things, like Uber, they'll leave a message on my voice mail. I'll be notified of that as soon as they're done and will check it immediately.

That all works for me. It's a shame that I have to do all of that rather than just answer the phone, but there's no other option that I can see.

The feature they’re referring to , the phone won’t even ring and send the caller straight to voicemail. You won’t know you got the call unless you happen to be looking at the screen.

That's on your notification settings though. You can make Voicemails have a higher notification priority if you want. If you just turn on reject unknown calls and keep up everything else normally, you may have issues, but if you adjust some and do things like making voicemails more obvious and add more contacts to your phone, it works ok.

For sensitive times where I know I'm expecting a doctor/contractor to call, I'll just turn it off and set a reminder for later on to enable it again.

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