I thought this was excessive and impossible, but as I was reading, I realized nowadays everything you say is technically possible. The future gives me the chills.
The likely outcome is that the phone system becomes massively more locked down. Your phone will only ring if the caller has a number which is backed by a real ID, particularly one from your own country. It will become increasingly difficult to contact someone you don’t have a legitimate connection to.
The banking system will become increasingly fraud resilient with better real time detection of fraud.
Your phone may even have its own AI on your side listening in on the call and sounding the alarm when a number from Nigeria starts using an AI voice pretending to be your son.
> The likely outcome is that the phone system becomes massively more locked down.
We've had phone fraud for decades, and the system has dragged its heels forever. I genuinely don't know if even this will be enough to address phone spam.
You would just get called from an agent (bot) based in your country. There’s no easy way to prevent that. Fraud is massive and it’s becoming cheaper and easier to run at scale.
China has much stricter control over phone #'s and identities than USA/EU does. It's much more difficult for me to create a placeholder digital identity in China. I wouldn't love that solution, but it exists.
As a result, it's very difficult for me to use a lot of Chinese websites and it's a pretty sizable barrier to hardware development when Chinese citizens can just download the relevant datasheet off some Chinese forum in 5 minutes, but I have to sign NDA's with western companies or figure out how to WeChat a Chinese OEM to send me their datasheets.
I swear it's harder for us to access Chinese sites than it is for them to VPN to outside services. There's one event I was looking at going to in China but the announcements/chat was on QQ which as far as I can tell is just impossible to access.
Then when it gets reported the authorities can just look up the owner of that number and arrest them. Vs overseas based operations that are difficult to follow up on.
The authorities already don’t have much leverage over “domestic” spam call centers that are actually located overseas but somehow always manage to acquire domestic numbers to call from.
A couple of years ago Australia had a big reform of the laws where sms providers / voip companies had to actually verify their users owned the numbers they send from. Anecdotally before then I was getting a scam text message every day, now I haven’t had one in years.
Phone numbers in Australia are also all tied to ID. If there is a will to fix the system, it can be done.
Ostensibly this is what STIR/SHAKEN was supposed to cover but aiui they basically fucked it up so bad that it will only work for domestic calls in the US.
My annual Adobe subscription expires in 15 days and I'm here gathering all possible alternatives. This is my last year giving them money after all dark patterns they use so you pay / don't leave.
I created an account in X yesterday because I'm trying to get more involved into building in public and the social aspect of development and I was shocked to see nowadays you can pay for X premium where the more you pay, the more interactions you get to your tweets.
At the end I just deleted it and created an account into Bluesky instead.
When X premium came out they said if I paid my tweets would be boosted more. I didn't pay, and my account with a few hundred followers went from 100ish views per average tweet to 10.
If you think you don't need to pay for engagement on there I can only assume you're paying for it and unaware of the difference.
It's probably not "the more you pay the more interactions you get", but there definitely is "if you pay, you get more interactions". Blue checks are boosted in top of replies etc., and is ironically often the exact people you don't want to see.
if you go to the premium section and look at the benefits it literally says (from memory) if you pay 3.5€/month you get a small boost on interactions for your tweets. If you pay 5€/month you get a bigger boost on interactions if you pay (I don't remember how much it is) 22€/month ~ you get the biggest boost for your tweets.
That to me sounds like if you don't pay, you're going to be in the bottom of the feed for everyone else.
I just looked and it doesn't say that. It only says that you have a higher chance to show up in front of other users in the reply section. It does not say that Premium Plus gets more of a boost than Premium. It is not a perk of Basic.
You're missing the point. There's a difference between buying an ad, something that's clearly marked as an ad and inserted as an ad, vs having your normal posts appear organic but still getting put in front of more people.
Or, it's mainly the opposite. If you don't pay, you no longer get the organic, not even from your own followers.
20 minutes max seems fair to me. For context I was once given a 1 week assignment just to be discarded without any feedback. From then on if it takes more than a day I won't do it.
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