Facebook and others keep that in mind as you relentlessly monetize without offering value to people.
Pretty much all of my communication on Facebook Messenger is with my friends, and the rest is with some groups I'm in to find local events, which I could leave hassle-free at any time with the click of a button. No communication with spammers or businesses, with the exception of someone with an obviously hacked account once every few years.
With the rare exception, my incoming calls on my phone are either my doorbell (which I answer if I'm expecting someone), or spammers (who I don't answer).
So I would say Facebook keeps this in mind much better than the phone company.
The phone companies also owe me nothing, and they provide a worse experience and will likely continue to do so unless forced by the FCC (which seems to be getting better lately).
I do use SMS/MMS but forwarded to my web browser so I don't have to look at my phone.
At the moment, Messenger is better for both text and voice/video calls. If that changes, my friends and I will adapt.
My would you not answer if you don't expect someone? Pranks? Sellers? I have never experienced any door knockers that are obnoxious, except one seller once. Mostly it is friends, neighbours or missionaries who are unannounced.
Can you explain how talking to my neighbors about important social issues falls under that criteria?
People they don’t know trying to convince them they should care about a political issue they don’t care about or they are terrible and bad people is what people don’t like. It’s usually the second one, even if someone thinks it’s the first one.
I think if you want to live in a community, you have to be open to having conversations with your coinhabitants about polemic issues. Anything less is unkind.
Regardless, persistent lobbying from a stranger is no more solicitation than softer lobbying from a friend.
People in battleground areas often have buses of activists brought in from neighboring states to do door to door canvassing. Among other things.
Thanks for calling everyone who wants to be able to cast their vote without active harassment from people with no stake in their community or reputation to worry about first ‘the root of the problem’ though.
Still, does someone in Georgia not have a stake in whether Florida lines their roads with radioactive agricultural waste? In our industrialized, globalized economy stakes reach much farther than a neighborhood or city level.
Bit of a straw man to quote something nobody in this thread said.
Nobody said civic duty is champagne and French fries. Just that rejecting it has a cost, and the people who cause that cost have a tendency to congregate. That, in turn, frees up resources for the communities who bother organizing.
And you’re the one that keeps beating ‘civic duty’ when I’m pointing out the disingenuous and manipulative nature of a lot of the current political strategies - including fake grass roots ‘neighbors’.
Which people have a right to ignore, despite your statements otherwise.
Personally, I’d argue they have an actual civic duty to ignore or even ostracize folks doing that, as that kind of manipulative lying is what poisons actual civic discussion.
These aren't neighbors. We're talking about neighbors.
> everyone who wants to be able to cast their vote without active harassment from people with no stake in their community
Your neighbors have a stake in your community. It's almost part and parcel with the definition. Refusing to engage with them because you assume to know better obviously impacts the community's strength, cohesiveness and civic integrity.
Campaign staff are not welcome.
That would be an interesting case in the US. A country deeply steeped in God.
I guess it comes down to the effective wanna answer the door to not wanna answer the door ratio. I don't want to miss someone I'd like to meet to avoid the 1/X chance of a seller. As sibling comment noted that ratio probably depends on local circumstances.
I've had plenty of obnoxious salespeople and other solicitors, especially religious ones. They even have the nerve to claim that they aren't soliciting because they're not selling anything for money. And none of them have the good sense to accept that they're bothering someone that is obviously not happy that their door was knocked on.
Unless I'm already in a really bad mood, I generally start off nice, but I turn serious as soon as they refuse to take the first 'no'. Except for the ones I argue with for a while to waste their time and energy.
I have my other communication (mostly FB Messenger, but also Discord and SMS/MMS) set up to work on my computer, so I rarely look at my phone at home.
Also I live in a condo, nobody can really "knock on my door" unless it's someone who lives in my building, in which case I'll answer.
My thought is that you knocking on my door does not oblige me to stop what I'm doing and answer it, any more than someone saying, "sir, do you have a minute for..." while I'm walking down the street obliges me to stop and hear their sales pitch, or seeing an unknown caller on the phone means I ought to pick it up.
The straw that broke the camel's back was that somebody had their fax machine to send something to a (wrong) number every night at 2am. The phone company said they had no way to just block that number for us, but that for abusive calls we could talk to the police. The police said they couldn't do anything because although it was an extreme nuisance, it didn't fit the legal definition of abusive. Since we were going to have to change our number because of this anyway, we decided to just move to a platform with which we really could manage blacklists and such.
A prior experience had a debt collection agency calling us a couple of times a week, asking for some guy we never heard of. Each time we'd tell them that this was a wrong number, but they'd just call back a couple days later anyway. I tried using logic: the person they were looking for apparently had a Florida address, while the number they were calling at was a NJ number (back when you could pretty definitively link phone numbers to geography). The guy calling us agreed that it didn't make sense, but that didn't matter. I finally told them that the guy was deceased, and oddly, they seemed to buy that.
Anyway, my experience suggests that the demise of land lines has been not just because of the nuisance itself, but also because the technology and regulatory situation didn't allow people any effective way to deal with it.
Makes me wonder what that will eventually mean to email, SMS, etc., if anything.
EDIT: my current solution for spam calls on our VoIP line is three-pronged.
1) Known abusers are blacklisted, never to be heard from again. I don't really use this, though, because they're probably just spoofing the number anyway.
2) Everybody on my contact list can freely ring our phone, no problem.
2) Otherwise, the call is intercepted by a voice response system. It just tells them that if they want to talk to us, to push "2". Bots never do that, so we're very nearly 100% free of spam calls.
My grandparents had this so bad. I stayed with them a few times over the last few years, for weeks or months at a time as we dealt with some family tragedies.
One day I decided to keep track of how many telemarketer and scam/spam/Medicare/insurance/banking-fraud calls they got in one day. I lost count somewhere in the 15-20 region. It was constant.
Dealing with my father-in-law's financials we found some odd "donations" to groups we never could identify, not a lot so it wasn't worth investigating further, but we also couldn't find any trace of some of these orgs either. I assume some were scammers. Thankfully we got his finances arranged so everything had to be approved later in life.
Really? I get just about zero spam calls (maybe 1-2/year) on my landline (which I've had since the 90s).
But I could subscribe to extended car warranties twenty times per day on my cellphone if I answered those calls.
I always answer the landline phone because it is just about guaranteed to be a real call. I absolutely never answer my cellphone because it is a lost cause.