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Comment by alyeska2 | Hacker News Reader

Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.

I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.

Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.

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I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.

Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?

Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?

Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.

It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).

I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.

Right now X requires either a phone number, or email + phone hardware ID.

Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762

But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.

Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.

Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!

But I don't think that's the case for Bluesky

It's because of spam. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.

AI would classify anything disagreeing with the government as spam. For example right now it would classify anything opposing Israel as spam.

Are you sure that's not just people getting fed up with you and hitting the mute button? I just mute those people.

That trains the AI

Yes and most importantly when the black box flags something as spam there will be no appeal.

> Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company

Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?

in the US? no.

If you think Walmart buying your digital info is bad, get this: cops and feds are allowed to buy it, too

Can you use Google voice still without providing another phone number ?

I don't remember giving my phone to bluesky

I didn't

You might try attacking the problem from the other direction. If your country allows buying a SIM card without KYC, then do that.

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