Hacker News Reader

I agree fully. I've no clue why phone numbers a prerequisite for most email account providers or anything else I have to sign up for. There is no quicker way to make me bail on a signup flow that to demand something that has nothing to do with what I'm using. I barely use my phone as it is, so I'm excited to see what the world will look like for me when I finally eschew it!

View on HN

Many services need a process that makes it hard for spammers to create a large number of accounts. If getting that costs a small number of real customers who can't use your service, oh well, the need to fight spammers is objectively more important to them as long as there aren't too many real customers with such problems.

Requiring phone numbers is a system that works quite reasonable, as most people have a phone number, and it's not that easy (and certainly not free) for a spammer to get thousands of phone numbers to make thousands of fake identities.

Phone number is probably endured without thought by most people, it then makes their database hugely more valuable; matching phone numbers and email addresses must be a key link for profile matching for advertisers/law enforcement/government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com