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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Back in 2011 or so the Yellow Pages still delivered physical phone books to ever address in the state where we were. My city literally sent out an extra off cycle recycling truck the next day to pick them all up. Everyone threw them out.

Well my coworkers and I realized that the opt out form just needed an address. We contemplated pulling all known addresses for the entire country and automating submitting them all over several months to opt everyone out. I don’t think it ever materialized but we had a good chuckle about the emergency meeting the Yellow Pages web devs would have had and at what percentage of opt outs.

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Around the same time frame, my brother rented some rooms in his house to people who had the occupation of actually delivering those phone books. (This was in a different country, but apparently the Yellow Pages existed everywhere.)

The delivery-people got overwhelmed and eventually just resorted to putting the stacks and stacks of phone books into piles and burning them. It took a long time until they got caught because nobody really misses a phone book.

I sure do! Calling all local contractors for a quote VS falling for the SEO king.

whitepages vs yellowpages

I think dad wanted some extra money one year and he took my brother and I out and delivered 100s of phonebooks in our area.

i think we got a season pass to 6 flags out of it, but i'm not positive

The mailroom of my apartment building in college in 1988 was full of phone books that were unclaimed. I took enough to make a platform for my futon.

As funny as these stories are it makes my environmentalist blood boil. Such ridiculous waste at scale for a product barely anyone actually wants.

Pre-internet the commercial phone book was actually fairly useful. The "problem" was that most people didn't need it updating as often as the phone book company would have liked.

I well stocked research library had phone books from all over.

> I don’t think it ever materialized but we had a good chuckle about the emergency meeting the Yellow Pages web devs would have had and at what percentage of opt outs.

They would just pretend they didn't receive the opt outs, like half of the direct mailers and spammers out there.

I've gone through the trouble of trying to get Uline to stop sending gigantic paper catalogs to my PO Box two or three times per year. They have a form, they just ignore the requests:

https://www.uline.com/CustomerService/ULINE_FAQ_Ans?FAQ_ID=4...

I managed to get off uline’s list I think they have a phone number. If one ever orders from them again the process needs to be repeated. This was a physical address not a PO Box.

One day many years ago, I saw an item that I did an impulse buy on. It wasn't an ad, but just lame ol' bored surfing discovery. I never even saw the rest of the site the item was bought from. Later I started receiving printed catalogs from the site. It followed me through 3 moves, and I never used USPS forwarding. I assume the site eventually died as the catalogs just stopped showing up

Similarly I remember being at Australia Post discussing data privacy for a project and I couldn't help but make the wisecrack remark "don't y'all routinely distribute millions of individual's personal data every year and just leave the information lying about on people's doorstops for anyone to access?"

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