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Comment by not_the_fda | Hacker News Reader

They have a pricing problem. Not many people are going to buy an old analog phone in 2023 for $200 - $300. And the analog to bluetooth adapter they are selling is $80 and shouldn't cost more than $20.

If they dropped the prices to between $50 and $100 they might sell as a novelty.

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It seems worse than that:

https://archive.is/wlca5/05d66ca7461fc695941b9e7be0214d4ba72...

At this point, what they have is a liability, not an asset.

Edit: if you're getting captcha failures, it's an overhead shot of the 15+ trailers/shipping containers they store phones in.

You get the random person who will drop a few bucks on old telephony/computer/electronic gear for the novelty/nostalgia. But it's not really a business at scale; there are only so many geeks looking to pair money burning holes in their pockets with impractical equipment. I know I have some stuff in my garage that someone probably wants and which I'd give them for free even but connecting with someone--especially outside of a city--is hard and I'm not willing to go to much effort.

Does anyone else get an endless reCAPTCHA loop on archive.is?

Same thing here.

Hi. I'm the user who compulsively responds to the Archive Endless Captcha issue. Mostly it's to say that this isn't the old Cloudflare rDNS issue.

And to provide these discussion links that sort of include a workaround:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38171778

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38063548#38063580

my workaround is to never click on those links

That works too. But then I don't feel like I overpowered malicious design.

The entire internet feels maliciously designed to me

Interesting, switched away from CF DNS-over-TLS and it works now.

I get the endless reCAPTCHA on my laptop but not on my phone for some reason, even though they use the same Internet connection.

Totally agree. Some of the older stuff used to be worth money, but seems like they were not focused on sales/marketing.

Just to haul it all off to the dump would cost a fair amount.

I think they need to hire a zoomer on commission to promote the phones on TikTok and shilling them away with the bluetooth adapter being free. Tie this in with a giant telephone art project to draw folks in.

> Tie this in with a giant telephone art project to draw folks in.

Short story contest: All the phones ring at once.. but why, and who is on the other end?? Also, classic telephones are the only way to enter/exit the Matrix, so with the decline of the payphone elsewhere this guy is sitting on a type of mass-transit system.

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