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Comment by pratchett | Hacker News Reader

How are messaging apps still getting these valuations when Telegram, signal, Whatsapp and lime chat exist?

They all want to be the WeChat of the rest of the world. They want a platform that people live inside and all other companies just become apps inside their store (where they collect a tax of course).

None of the mentioned apps have managed to do this. Maybe that is because there is no consumer interest, but it doesn't make the goal any less appealing.

They all seem to be missing the part where WeChat played out this way because the Chinese government mandated it, not because people have an inherent desire to do everything in a single "app". WeChat is an island of Chinese-controlled services and content within a sea of Western-run mobile platforms.

There's also the argument that Apple would never approve such a "super app" in their walled garden because it could usurp their position.

Only one of those doesn't require your phone number.

It'll be nice when we get to the point where we can have a proper working chat app that doesn't require one. Hangouts used to be great but Google has to always make sure their chat doesn't work.

Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?

You can purchase access to phone numbers for the purposes of verifying accounts. While phone numbers are a method to prevent easy sybil attacks, it is not effective when dealing with a determined actor.

It raises the cost for any spammer, including determined actors. More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers.

A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.

> More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers

Not a big deal, there's sms verification services, they have APIs and premade libraries, cost is about ~$0.06/verification depending on which service you use, and less with bulk discounts.

And spoiler: you can’t use those for spam.

Huh?

There is a ToS in these services as well.

And you can't use many from those services to actually register an account for a meaningful service. E.g. have you created Instagram account with them?

Seems like there is a determined will to blacklist as many as possible.

I believe you're thinking phone numbers from legitimate VoIP services like Twilio, or the "texting app" service-providers that build on top of them.

The GP is talking more about phone numbers from purpose-built (usually Russian) "secondary market for other people's credentials" marketplaces, where people sell the use of their own personal phone numbers (usually through cloud remote-control software they run on an old Android device with the SIM in it.)

No there is not.

5sim.net, sms-activate.org, smspva.com, I'm talking about these, they're specifically made for that purpose, you can pick a country and a service

It starts from 4 cents per number. If my bot isn't going to make that 4 cent within its first few hours I am in the wrong business.

There are scenarios, such as communicating with my children, where someone doesn't have a phone number.

Hangouts worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo/whatever the other one was, that's all I was saying.

Google talk worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Hangouts which worked less great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo.

The sad part of it all ... Google Talk - by orders of magnitude their best chat offering was just xmpp/jabber the whole time.

People shouldn’t be expected to give up their privacy and anonymity and put themselves at greater risk of identity theft because big tech can’t be bothered figuring out a different way to solve spam.

Just because the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving out their phone number, it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get sim swapped and have all of my bank accounts drained because some random company with zero security measures demands I provide my phone number to use their app.

I think you're misplacing your annoyance here. A lot of the world is not constantly affected by Sim swapping. Your phone number is not a secret either. The problem is the minimal verification that allows sim swapping to exist in the first place.

Unless you have beef with a state sponsored actor, you’re safe with Signal. Possibly even then

If you have beef with a state sponsored actor I’m not really sure what you’re doing on HN. The Taliban uses WhatsApp lmao

These companies don't expect you to give up privacy and anonymity. They expect you to pay $1 to rent a phone number. To these companies, a phone number is an externalized reusable proof-of-stake in the PSTN NFT market — nothing more, nothing less.

It's not perfect. I've gotten accounts suspended from phone verification services. I don't want to share numbers with spammers and drug dealers for this reason.

A given practice does not need to be 100% effective in order to provide value. Simply imposing a financial barrier of any kind is often enough to reduce malicious activity by a considerable degree.

I can pick up PAYG Sims for verifying for essentially nothing (I think the cheapest I've seen here is 10p).

A phone number proves, and stops nothing.

If you can't detect spam from either the message, the volume or from other users reporting, then you have bigger problems.

But you can’t automate that trivially

If I wanted to automate I would use a bulk VoIP service.

You are focussing on the wrong point, I only mentioned that because I could get on these services with a disposable number.

So if you are so well versed in the matter, what’s keeping you from starting a chat service that doesn’t require phone numbers?

Apparently people are willing to invest a lot of money, that could be yours!

From a technical standpoint it's trivial to identify and block voip services.

Phone verification isn't designed to stop spam, it's designed to make it prohibitively expensive to scale spamming, and it seems pretty good at that. If you want to get around phone verification in a quick one-off fashion, yes it's going to be really easy. But there's no way to automate that one-off end run at scale without a lot of money and/or a lot of people. That's the whole point.

It's trivial to identify and block VoIP prefix allocations. That's different from identifying/blocking VoIP services, which — especially in the case of blackhat services — can operate entirely by buying and porting one-off numbers from residential cellular ISPs.

It just rises the upfront costs, but if the revenue exceeds these a thousand times...

My phone number itself gets a lot of spam.

Charge a fee

Entry fee and extra cash required for posting when the user is flagged. Can't make it without moderators, but it's phone independent.

The economy is detached from reality

this was also 2 years ago, at the peak of the madness. These days it's far less likely to get that kind of money.

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