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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

>telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam

Caller had to pay long distance costs at the time and really until you got in the later 90s early 2000's did you start seeing unlimited long distance everywhere.

Getting cold calls from random people way back then was super rate because it was expensive.

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"Extremely cheap global telecommunications accessible to everyone" came with a lot of drawbacks we didn't consider at the time they started to become viable. Although all the spam in our inboxes should have been a clue.

Not exactly an advantage to pay a fee to a middleman. It's more like frictionless communication should be the default, and we had a period where friction accidentally acted as signal

I mean if the signal isn't replaced by anything, then the onus is put on to the person receiving the call. If years ago, there was a barrier for an army of phone scammers from across the world throwing everything they can think of at an old person with borderline dementia, and suddenly that went away..I don't know how you can really justify the "frictionless communication" outside of a couple of options. A) "Well it's their fault, they should be on their guard all the time everyone is always trying to scam and manipulate you" -- (idk about you but this seems pretty grim and inhumane) B) "well it's a net benefit for ~someone~ so we should all be happy about it, and refer to A)"

You don't actually want frictionless communication. Frictionless communication will drown you in a mountain of spam.

A 'Frictionless' ability to transmit puts all the friction, pain, and negative externalities onto the recipient.

I want frictionless communication with the people I've already communicated with, but very high friction communication with people I've never talked to before. I'd love a way to charge $10 to get into my inbox. If it ends up being a long lost friend or whatever, I'll Venmo them back the $10.

You can send everyone not on a list to spam and auto respond with a link to pay you $10 to get on the white list

should be doable

Not currently doable with phone calls.

From what I understand, the caller ID feature is completely useless. There is no willingness to implement rules that guarantee the number the call is coming from is the owner of the number. The best you can do is call them back and hope the routing doesn't get screwed up.

Depends on the circuit that you are dialling out onto.

I know where I work there are some rules about presenting whatever number you want on our trunk provider, but this is something they have put in place themselves with no "legal" reason for them to do it. We've been working with them for years so we are one of their trusted clients and have the ability to present any number we want as long as we have permission to do so from the number owner.

The fact its up to the trunk provider to put these rules in place and not just standard everywhere is wild to me.

You'll have to just to send your reply!

If I was your long lost friend I probably wouldn't pay the $10 upfront.

Not much of a friend then eh

This use case is actually the reason we have bitcoin, tho it's a shame it took off as a protest to banks instead of getting implemented as a functional anti-spam tool. To this day spam is regularly in my inbox and I have to check my spam folder for legitamate messages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Well, no. That’s the reason we have hash cash (the pow algo for bitcoin)

Bitcoin itself, as with most early cryptocurrencies, is and was a protest against banks and centralized finance.

fair enough, I should say it was a prerequisite

There's nothing stopping this from happening. Build encryption into the email protocols and hide the decrypt key behind a block chain that costs even $0.01 of a fungible token to access.

the blockchain, as usual, is not necessary, the header is proof enough on that a penny worth of energy[0] was expended in generating the hash

[0] (or however much energy you want to demand before throwing the message in the spam folder - you just require whatever number of leading zeros in the hash ie crank up the difficulty, bitcoin's innovation was assigning ownership to these proofs-of-work via signatures and implementing a mechanism to update and broadcast that ownership)

There’s lots of services like this that I have seen, including a popular one where you can donate $1 to a charity in order for your email to reach someone’s inbox.

Ye imagine if you got 50c for each call or email you received not on a whitelist and the social contract was to refund it by pressing #1 after the call ended or whatever.

Pay numbers are a thing so I guess it should be doable.

Yes please. SMS too.

> It's more like frictionless communication should be the default

No. We should have complete control on how much friction anybody gets to communicating with us. And frictionless should absolutely not be the default.

Friction is signal.

I recall I used to individually send snaps to like 30 friends each time, back before Snapchat invented Stories. I had to think a tiny bit, and put a tiny bit of effort, for each person. We lost that when people started posting to stories only.

With enough technological development we can make everything in the future like getting off from the airport train in a big third world city and surrounded by beggars and fraudsters. Robocalls, AI blogspam, Email, Facebook etc.

This is a great point. "More common" wasn't the best choice of words because it implies a higher frequency, which was not the case. "More acceptable/accepted/normalized" would have been better phrasing.

I mean, if you want to be pedantic about it, I suppose it depends on whether or not “telephone sales” implies something actually being sold.

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