I don’t think anyone answers the phone now, unless they recognize the number.
Most of the calls I get are
- spam
- spam
- someone sent me a time sensitive message, so they ring me once to respond faster
- spam
Yeah, I’m early gen-x and I only answer the phone if its a member of my immediate family and even then it’s 50/50. Capitalism ruins everything. Need to talk to me? Leave a message and I’ll decide if and when to call you back.
Everyone I want to talk to knows not to call me; I feel exactly the same. Phones used to be useful, but the sheer volume of telemarketers and scams have reduced it to uselessness. If it wasn’t for 2FA occasionally requiring a phone number, I wouldn’t even have one at this point.
Same. In the last few years (2-3 probably, I don’t count) I don’t think I have given it out anywhere. I just pretend to not have a phone number, and if people think that’s weird I don’t care, deal with it. Nowadays if a service requires my phone number, I don’t need that service. Or in rare cases I’ll try to find a free online number for receiving a code, but that’s the only alternative I take.
You don’t always have a choice as it is dictated by the service provider, but whenever possible, disable SMS based MFA and enable TOTP or something else. SMS based MFA is susceptible to SS7 MitM attack.
2FA
Use an authenticator or Yubi key. SMS authentication is the worst possible method.
American? I’m from The Netherlands and I get maybe 1 spam call every other month or so. And I’ve been using the same number for almost 25 years.
Canada, we face the same issues as the US for telecom stuff
Must be nice to a functional telecommunications agency that has the tools to punish soammers.
Oh we do too. Verizon and att make money off of selling the scammers our phone numbers and they wont spend the money to stop it
Settings>Do not disturb>exceptions>Caller in contacts
alt: Set default ringtone to silent, no vibration, Set people in contacts to custom ringtones.
in ios there is a phone app setting to silence unknown callers.
Lucky me I rarely get spam calls
I mean, maybe a hot take, maybe not … casual/social voice conversations at a distance were never a good idea in the first place.
Not absolutely at least. A disconnected voice that can summon your attention at any time wherever you are is a weird, uncomfortable, unpleasant and maybe unhealthy thing.
Textual communication at a distance odd much more natural, as it matches the disconnected communication with a more formal and abstract medium.
A recent survey found a quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer the phone - respondents say they ignore the ringing, respond via text or search the number online if they don’t recognise it.
As they should.
Texting is also damn convenient, I can deal with several conversations at once without having to pause the movie I’m watching.
Speaking on the phone doesn’t just tie your line, it ties your whole life too.
Another advantage of text, for me at least, is that I can read much faster than I can listen. This is why I prefer text articles to news videos, even though video can often offer extra visual information over what photographs can offer.
That said, I do somewhat agree with the article’s concern that live conversation is an independent skill and potentially has its own unique side-benefits that might be becoming rarer.
Sure works wonders if you’re busy with a chore. Laundry? Dishwashing (for the unfortunate souls without easy access to a dishwasher)? That’s the best time to call any yakker you know!
Everyone I need to talk to is in my contacts. If you’re not in my contacts, my phone doesn’t even ring. You go straight to voicemail.
I was fine with phone calls when I was younger. Now it’s mostly spam robocalls or scammers or both. Nobody seems interested in solving those problems.
I am interested in solving them. Here’s how: if you get any phone call that makes you even the slightest bit irritated, you hit a button and receive a quarter paid by the caller. This is traced through carriers. If the trace cannot continue for any reason or exits US jurisdiction, the most recent carrier foots the bill. I guarantee that spam calls will suddenly cease to exist overnight.
I like the way you think.
This kind of approach solves so many problems, as the vendors have a vested interest
People answer phones?
It’s a meme among people that know me that you pretty much have to leave a message if a text won’t do. I genuinely can’t remember the last phone call I answered. Thinking back, it was when my dad was having surgery, and they give calls with updates. That was maybe three years ago?
But I’ve been doing that since I got my first answering machine back in the nineties. I fucking hate talking on the phone. Even as a teenager, if it wasn’t someone I was having sex with, it wasn’t going to be a long call. The only exceptions were my two best friends, and my grandmother. One grandmother just didn’t call to chat. The other only called rarely, and you don’t fucking ignore your grandmother. Neither grandfather was going to call either. My mom’s dad would drive over if he wanted to talk about something with one of us. The other was dead.
There are two people I would answer a call from, my wife and my best friend. But they’d never call outside of an emergency because they know I hate phones for talking. I probably would for my dad, but he hates phones almost as much as I do.
“It’s the anxiety associated with real-time conversations, potential awkwardness, not having the answers and the pressure to respond immediately” - this hits the nail on the head for me about not wanting to be on the phone/teams call in the work place. Being pulled into a call with no context is my biggest nightmare.
If: you’re a starred contact and call twice within 10 minutes and I happen to have the phone at hand and I’m pretty sure you have something important to say I’ll probably pick it up.
That happens about once or twice a year. We invented voicemail so we can speak when it works well for both parties.
That’s why I just block all calls and send them to voicemail.
If we need a phone call, we’ll schedule it, and we’ll be using an app.
This is part of the problem for me. I can’t dismiss the popup unless I hang up, and I don’t want to do that in case my number gets marked as “active”.
So I sit there and wait till I can use it again.
Also I appreciate the detailed alt text :)
Yet Another Call Blocker solves that problem.
I send all calls other than contacts directly to voice mail, and my phone never even rings.
at least on iphone you can swipe away the notification without hanging up.
Press the volume down button. This will immediately silence the call without hanging up.
This is soo me! Declining the call would pull more attention. I play dead.
Let it ring. Robocall centers only work when they maximize volume, the more time they spend not getting an answer the more money they’re not making. If you wanna get real saucy, wait as long as you can, accept the call, say nothing or mute your mic. They wont spend more than 5-10 seconds before they hang up on you though because they know it too.
Letting it ring has no impact. They have autodiallers that call, and when someone picks up, only then is that call assigned to someone in the call centre.
You can often tell this because there is a marked delay in the response to your initial “Hello?”. Long enough that you can reliably just hang up if you don’t hear a response in two seconds.
If it’s a real person who actually wants to call you and they you call again straight away, you can just shrug off your hang-up as a network issue.
Press the volume down button. This will immediately silence the call without hanging up.
“A voice note is just like talking on the phone but better,” says Susie Jones, a 19-year-old student. “You get the benefits of hearing your friend’s voice but comes with no pressures so it’s a more polite way of communicating”.
Gross, voice notes are the worst of both worlds.
Text for things that are information critical, phone calls for things that are time critical.
Email for business (and keep the original chain going instead of starting a new one every time you think of something else to add!), text messages for associates, chat apps for friends and family.
Anyone who disagrees is wrong.
Voice notes are pretty great when you’re driving.
I’ve actively told any friend that send me a voice note that if you want me to respond to you don’t send it as a voice note, I won’t listen to it. It requires me to put headphones in or play it on speaker, and neither of those are happening unless it’s important.
hard agree, voice messages are the worst of both worlds, you can’t look at it and get the gist of what’s said, and you have to deal with listening to it, while requiring more bandwidth to use.
I’ve told my friends instead of pressing the voice button, just press the speech to text button, I’m more likely to read a wall of text than listen to a voice message.
Yeah, voice notes are the “your solution to your problem is somewhere in the middle of this 20 minute long YouTube video that could have been a short forum post with some screenshots instead” of the communication world.
Jesus, it’s not just me! It seems like every answer I need is only found in a video format without labeled bookmarks/sections. I hate it so much. Give me a how-to with concise instructions and gifs, or give me death.
Can’t get ad revenue on a short, concise, and helpful page.
Even a basic cookie recipe requires someone’s whole life story to fill in the blank space between 10 ads
They are the worst unless you want to hear that person’s voice.
I mostly agree, but I think voice notes for close friends/family probably have a point.
At this point, I would also argue that texts/emails are also for time critical things since voice calls are essentially dead at this point.
99.99999% of the phone calls I get are spam. I haven’t gotten a new voice mail in like 6 months.
I don’t mind a ‘phone call’ so long as it isn’t actually using a phone number where ISPs can spy, but using some encrypted service.
Eh. Gen-x here. I still have an hour long phonecall over signal with my best friend over signal two times a week or so.
In my teens I wasn’t too happy about making phonecalls either, but working on a helpdesk for a while sure cured that.
The US has a do not call list. The vast majority of robocalls are illegal scams which originate from outside of the country.
So those calls are not for the benefit of US companies?
Like I said, they’re mostly scams. Warranty scams. Posing as “your bank” (which they, of course, don’t name). Etc. Legitimate companies follow the do not call list, since there are heavy penalties if they don’t.
Gotcha. That sucks.
Who knows?
We know the call center is not US-based, as those can be fined.
I’d venture most are scams too.
The majority of them are run from scam call centers in India, but also in Southeast Asia.
Even worse, many of those scammy companies use the Do Not Call list as a list of known active numbers. Since the DNC is an opt-in thing, the call centers know that people have proactively added their numbers to the list.
Canada as well.
I don’t really get the whole not answering the phone thing. I hate phonecalls but I always answer my phone.
The amount of important calls I’d have missed if I buried my head in the sand like that is insane.
Sure if 90% of the calls were sales or scams I’d think differently, but there are ways to prevent that too.
I find it weird that everyone has their phone on silent all the time too. If mine was on silent I’d never look at it unless I’m bored.
Important news almost never comes via phone call. It comes in the mail or via email.
Tell that to the delivery driver that called me because they were outside with my groceries.
I get those notifications via text message.
Cool, with the phone on silent (which I don’t do) I’d have missed that too, and would have been cancelled and rescheduled.
This adamant denial that phone calls are useful is weird.
I never said they’re not useful for anyone. They’re not useful for me.
You realize that it still vibrates when on silent, so you know when you’re getting a text or phone call right?
Only if it’s right by you or isn’t in your bag or something. Hence audible alerts, they break through the physical barriers.
I get called like once or twice a week, and it’s usually something time sensitive or important. Always found people just flat out refusing to answer the phone crazy.
honestly i think this is due to unplanned voice calls essentially being broken technology now.
imagine we had 2020s email spammers while mail servers had 1990s spam filters, that’s basically where we’re at now with unplanned voice.
