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Comment by jdanyow | Hacker News Reader

Would it be possible to build an app to automate all this?

Great question. I think the biggest challenge would be maintaining high-quality reports/complaints. Basically, preventing people from reporting things that they opted in to but are frustrated with (just because it's really easy to do). There's a chance that the reports would actually become worse (less actionable) if it was too easy or too automated.

A small challenge is that the high-quality carrier lookup APIs charge a fee for each query. The fee is tiny (like 1/10th of a cent per number), but enough to add up.

If anyone is interesting in discussing this, my email address is in my HN profile.

I see no downside to frustration also blocking a business. Dark pattern sub/unsub? Messaging hourly because marketing thinks you’re that important? Either pay to design an experience respectful to customers or pay after the fact for losing access.

Off topic but your HN profile doesn't have your email

Thanks. I removed it this morning because I got an email from an HN user who is experiencing mental illness/delusions. My email address is pretty easy to find online, though, or I'm on Mastodon here: https://mas.to/@troyd

You'd undoubtedly have to design, at least at some point, for such a system to be explicitly attacked. I'm not assuming you haven't considered that, just pointing out that this might factor into how one might approach building something from the start.

I'd suggest it will depend on goals / scale - if not many are using, probably would be ignored even if bad actors were aware of it. If it started to have real effects, there'd undoubtedly be very intentional efforts to attack it. Beyond just the sporadic script kiddiez / for the lulz set ...

Edit: sorry, "app" - to potentially use the app in some malicious way ... Not sure my comment is so useful, but, I'll leave it since it's unfortunately all too easy to end up with unintended consequences. Though, I favor fighting this garbage wholesale and support any efforts to interfere with the deluge of BS / noise with modern communications tech.

Much of this is already established knowledge and practice in the world of email. People report spam for communications that they don't wish to receive, and often reporting spam is vastly simpler than any other option.

I'd propose that absent specific legal processes contact occurs at the consent and discretion of the contacted. That's one of a number of principles I've been kicking around under the notion of "Communications Autonomy"[1]. There is no fundamental right to attention. As such, any communications system which doesn't provide the ability to manage contact attempts and communications is in violation of those principles, and more concretely, as the annoyance and/or risk factors outweigh advantages and benefits, people and organisations will defect from those systems in droves.

The telecoms industry has been openly expressing concern that trust in the phone network will be lost. And by "phone network" I'm speaking broadly: POTS (plain old telephone service) and PSTN (public switched telephone networks), or any universal direct-access communications system.[2] I think we're seeing that breakdown. A key problem is that there isn't any single successor system that appears ready to step in, and most of the more likely proposed systems entail substantial concerns themselves over monopoly power and abuse, surveillance (state, capitalist, or other-actor varieties), etc.

I've got a few specific suggestions which I'm planning to make in a top-level comment to this thread.

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Notes:

1. See: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/108579251632091173>, <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107742445268072257>, and <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/622677903778013902fd00...>

2. Phone, email, SMS, social networking, postal mail, etc.

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