It's not an accident. They're not stupid. It is intentional. They want your personal information. Most of your personal information is tied to your email but it's easy enough to spin up an alias to sign in with. Requiring a phone number ensures that they know exactly who you are and can buy/sell/use your data accordingly. They also know what a giant pain in the dick it is to change your phone number, especially when you need it for these security checks. They also know sales conversion rates are much higher if they can get you on the phone. So yeah, they're not going to stop doing that.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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@formerlytomato There are multiple potential solutions to identify if an account is human:
- Most accounts don’t need to be there, and are force fed to people
- People can verify each other in a tree like fashion. If someone turns out to be recruiting bots, trim that branch and everyone verified under that person will disappear as well
- Recently: https://w3c.social/@timbl/113867689846939249
I didn't get into it in the article, but I've been thinking this is exactly what Fediverse platforms need. Instead of, say, Lemmy instances going to full lockdown every time there's a massive exodus, having an "invite link" system would be massively helpful for people easily getting their friends on the platform while also taking a load off mods. In conjunction with Fedi's dispersion across multiple instances, this'll help even further w/ load-balancing.
I think Discord is an example of this sort of system working in practice. Usually server mods are dealing w/ a volume low enough that banning bots are easy and it's easy to find out who invited who or cut off access to certain links.
I have absolutely no need for my phone number, nor do I use it for anything that I couldn't use a voice app for. Just get rid of them altogether.
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