alt Hacker NewsA Golden Rule of the internet says that you should never reply to unwanted texts on any medium:
- stalkers and trolls live off reactions, both positive and negative ones
- spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side
- colleagues and friends will hate you because everybody thinks they're important
Replying only has negative effects. Use client-side filtering, kill files, blocking functions, or ignore the text - whichever fits best.
Replies
adastra22 • 10/01/2024
Except that STOP is handled at the carrier level and isn't even returned to the sender. It's effectively a mandated block command.
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> - spammers will use your reply to verify there's a human at the other side
For real spam, sure, but for semi-legitimate spam like real businesses and political fundraising, I'm not sure this is actually true. I have found replying with STOP did reduce the volume of political spam I was getting. I think it makes intuitive sense that they should try to respect opt-out signals: you don't want to piss off the people you're trying to appeal to. It hasn't entirely eliminated them, but it seems to have been more effective than Junking them.
Could just be coincidence, of course. Who knows.