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Comment by afroboy

2 years ago

How to you suggest to fight spam accounts without registering with a phone number?

Why is the defining feature of being human the property of having a phone number?

Spam is indeed a hard problem to solve, but the issuance of phone numbers is not designed to be used as human identification.

  • Maybe they're not necessarily going for "all humans that exist everywhere under any circumstances" but instead "humans likely to have access to a phone number which can sometimes receive SMS."

    Not every app needs to cater to every single human and potential use case on the planet.

What’s a spam account anyway? If I create a new account per conversation does that count as spam? It puts exactly the same strain on Signal servers.

  • A spam account is a fake account that sends spam. Like Bitcoin bullshit. Platforms like signal, Whatsapp, telegram, and others have an issue since you can just message literally every possible number. One way signal handles this is by not identifying that you even have an account unless you accept the message. There's also rate limiting and other stuff going on. But I'm pretty sure you know that a spam account is. If you really don't I'd love to learn how you use the Internet because I'd love to learn how to avoid these accounts. Twitter and Gmail loves to connect me with spam accounts.

    • How does signal know that account X is sending Bitcoin bullshit if the messages are encrypted? Also I see you have a Keybase account, Keybase doesn't use phone numbers, how do they solve "spam accounts" ?

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