How Maasai agro-pastoralists form and use accidental social ties (2021)
ecologyandsociety.org
ecologyandsociety.org
I gave it a try, texted $(my_number + 1) and said "hi, you're my phone number neighbor, our numbers are very similar. What's up?"
Their reply: "who are you and how did you get my number?"
Sadly she turned me down when I asked her out.
They said "hi, you're my phone number neighbor, our numbers are very similar. What's up?"
My reply: "who are you and how did you get my number?"
The whole one digit away thing could easily be a tactic a scammer uses.
In rural areas of the US, ALL of the phone numbers (at least until somewhat recently ) would share the same first 6 digits. Even now there are very few possible exchange prefixes in my area, though a lot of people's mobile phones are tied to another exchange prefix (phones not purchased locally/owner moved to the area and kept their old number)
Most people live where they grew up. Those people aren't conditioned to distrust it. They're also probably underrepresented on HN.
In Python, one would merely do:
export mynumber="+4912341234123"
python3 -c "import pip; pip.main(['install', 'phonenumbers']); \
import phonenumbers; x = phonenumbers.parse(\"$mynumber\", None); \
x.national_number = x.national_number + 1; \
print(x)"
This probably explains the reason for the accidental social ties.
I lived in a country where mobile phone calls were expensive relative to wages. Much of the time you'd receive a call that only rang once. The caller would hang up after only a single ring. This signalled they wanted to talk to you but didn't have enough "talk time" left. If the caller was a contractor or someone on your payroll, they would almost always employ this tactic to keep their costs down.
Fortunately we only pay for outgoing calls in my country, otherwise it would have been too expensive.
I bought a prepaid sim card, that had an expensive cost per minute (almost $1). I would call my parents landline once, as a signal to call me back.
It's one of the main reasons why SMS was the preferred communication methods between students, because calls were too expensive. This habit continued when we grew up, and now almost nobody calls each other. I guess the phone companies didn't think of that scenario...
“Do you accept the charges from <XYZ>?”
“No.” <then place a call to a known number in the other direction>(And there's a pretty clear downside to this. What if it's an actual emergency from a different phone than the standard. E.g. the only time I can remember answering a collect call, it was my sister calling from a foreign hospital after a serious accident. Trying to call back at a different number wouldn't have been great. I guess you could have a protocol involving multiple collect calls, and hope that there's no record that the first one was rejected.)
The B-A call back rate might be $0.20/min because it's just a normal call, not subject to the above fees.
There's the savings.
I remember some of my friends being "famous" for doing that all the time for every single call, operating the mobile at like 5$/year. The whole thing had it own jargon.
...
During our interviews, participants regularly received calls and nearly always answered the call, generally stepping away from the group until the call was over. This happened dozens of times over many meetings. And on a few occasions, the individual returned to the group and announced that the call was a wrong number.
...
During one meeting, a respondent received a wrong number call from another Maasai he had never met, and over a short conversation learned that their fathers were brothers. It was an astonishingly timely example of what we had been discussing. (That cousins would not have known about each other is not necessarily unusual in a society where polygynous families can be very large, and extended families exponentially so.)
This is great. The "Results - qualitative results" section is particularly worth reading
OTOH over the years (especially during covid lockdowns) I got a few messages from strangers on FB Messenger and Snapchat, and usually replied to them, and it was fun. However, it was always caused by some FB post/comment or Snapchat story that I posted before. Still, I guess if you have enough bored people, they will find a way to socialize no matter the medium.
Go on Facebook, enter a local group and interact with posts and become active in the community. After a while either people will contact you or people will be nice towards you contacting them.
The internet is too vast and the people are too interchangable, i have beed banned for stupid reasons in a few comunities.
I think a lot of people knows how easy is to be banned from reddit from certain subreddits for example for...no reason?
I personally think that permanent bans should not be a thing if not for really specific, grave and repeatet reasons. timed bans (even really long ones) i think are way more effective for incentivize anyone to change behaviour (creating a new account after begin banned is the preferred solution to a perma ban)
We lost a lot of humanity in the process.
That being said, I don’t get the logic of wanting to be part of a community that actively doesn’t want you. If I’d get banned from anywhere, I’d just move on. But I am still 100% supportive of banning as some people have genuinely ruined previously fun communities.
Depends on how many communities you contribute to and how much I guess
That being said, I don’t get the logic of wanting to be part of a community that actively doesn’t want you. Bans are not a vote from the comunity, is often an individual or a bot that does the ban
>If I’d get banned from anywhere, I’d just move on. But I am still 100% supportive of banning
Ban=new account
Suspension=wait it out and effectively get a punishment
It seems to be basically designed to make netiquette hard (more charitably : they designed it by assuming that people would give up on netiquette, which does seem to happen as a community gets larger).
It's one of the reasons I'm boycotting it now, but also being wary of too similar looking alternatives like Lemmy.
At the time, smartphones were not common and I was somewhat surprised that all maasais had cellphones (non-smartphones, usually). But of course I now understand that they're essential for a society that doesn't have any other form of connection (no landlines, so fast adoption of mobile, and also poor roads and no postal service).
And of course, it must have been much more surreal for them to see a random white young man walking alone in the middle of nowhere near their village.
My son and I never saw other muzungu, outside of tourist areas, while traveling overland by matatu/dala dala/minibus and probox across E. Africa / the horn (other muzungu seemed to all be traveling via organized tours-- or, at least, never by public transit like we were). Lots of villagers wanted photos with us when we stopped. It is an odd feeling to be the center of attention.
Most of our interaction with Maasai was just across the border from Tanzania inside Kenya in villages surrounding the Maasai Mara. Everyone we met was super nice. Although that was our experience pretty much everywhere in Africa except some large cities (which we tried to avoid anyway).
To me it always seemed like such a dumb attempt to lure people in, but perhaps other cultures might honestly read this as a genuine social relation.
Here's an NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...
what is this word that is being contracted here?
*this is a pet peeve. it could easily be a typo, but there is a large portion of people that believe the proper contraction is ya'll for some strange reason.
I thought that was “active number farming”. If so, a human replying is the end goal.
> Working in 10 rural communities in Tanzania, we conducted 16 group interviews with men about ...
> Nine separate interviews with groups of women revealed that women do not create WNCs
Wow.
1. Women tend to have stronger/closer "RNCs," or actual face-to-face communities.
2. Women have a good reason to be more wary of connecting with strangers under unexpected circumstances than men do.
> However, women informed us unequivocally that they (women) do not create these types of connections, largely because men often control women’s use of phones (Summers et al. 2020).