So IDK. It seems to be a problem, I just don’t have enough of a life for it to be for me.
OTOH it seems if you ever answer these even once you're no longer a random number to try you're immediately marked as a real person who can be tricked into answering at least some calls and will never hear the end of the endless ringing.
If you're deliberately making yourself hard to contact this way, a lot of people will just stop calling you.
If you mean for people you have relations with (friends/family/coworkers) most here gave up memorizing numbers a long time ago and none of those would show as an unknown number. This is common enough here in the US that the iPhone has a built in feature to only ring for known contacts and for unknowns only notify voicemails.
(Geo context: Poland, EU)
This strategy works fine in my experience. Most important calls I get are from people already in my address book. If I'm in a job hunting phase, I'll answer calls from numbers I don't recognize during time frames when I am expecting them (e.g. the policy is relaxed for the duration of a job hunt). But, outside of that, it's hard to imagine a call from someone I don't know that is so important I can't let it go to voicemail, but so unimportant that the caller will deign not to leave a voicemail to let me know this is really important.
I would say I am pretty privacy conscious (when possible), so this may not be the average person's experience.
Though with people of my age "cold calling" isn't all that common, typically you text the person first to make sure they are available and keen on a call. Unless it's an emergency of some sort, of course.
> Instead, report the phone number that the call instructs you to contact.
Under the above scenario most callers aren't dumb enough to leave a message, and I'd be concerned that actually engaging with anybody would increase the number of calls, at least in the short term.
If you're a staffer running the honeypot lines at the FCC, it would be fine because you can go home at the end of the day, but for a personal number I would need convincing. Would love to hear testimonials from anyone who tried this technique and their interpretation of the results.
You don't even have any submissions, yet.
As one who'd also like to see the ability to fully delete your HN account for privacy reasons I still think summarizing the alternative reasons as only aesthetics sells the counterarguments a bit short...
... but overall I'm getting myself and the whole conversation extremely off topic here. Probably best to discuss this in a thread about privacy on HN instead of one on robocallers.