The best way to end up on my Giant List of Most-Hated Entities is to send me a text message. Texts are for friends and family only. I'll tolerate the occasional appointment confirmation text, but other than that, my text inbox is the last place that has yet to be invaded by spammers.
And don't play dumb, randomly texting someone "Go Vote!" is absolutely spam. Texting someone because some sign-up form had automatic opt-in is equally spammy.
Everyone has different boundaries. For me: phone calls are for friends and family and texts messages are public; when I hand people my business cards I tell them "SMS only". I also despise email, but really don't mind receiving tons of text messages every day. Since no one is the same, it just isn't fair to be as annoyed as you are, especially when it sounds like your problem is so completely trivially solved that you have no one to blame but yourself: turn off notifications for text messages from people who are not in your address book.
Ok, and now someone has downvoted me within seconds of me posting that paragraph; the "I hate people contacting me" crowd is so amazingly vicious :/. Let's look at this from another perspective: I work with a group called Student Activist Network. The entire point of this group is you give them your phone number and they text you when actions come up related to your interests. Much like how anti-email spam people never are willing to believe that some people sign up for mailing lists on purpose, I bet they are also going to refuse to believe that hundreds of activists and protesters specifically want this kind of functionality, and right now the distribution is done manually by people copy/pasting.
Which is not a legitimate thing--and I will argue is actually an incredibly harmful thing--to have bubbled to the top of a thread about a tool like Hustle: I bet it is an extremely minority use for someone to try to use a tool like this to just randomly send messages to ranges of phone numbers.
I don't think that's what people are suggesting is happening.
A couple people who have my contact information from playing local sports have added me to email lists for causes they care about, which is incredibly irritating. I could see this happening with a texting tool.
Well, it's "generally" true: go look through threads on this stuff; what you always see are people who get extremely upset about having received e-mail, and it isn't actual spam by the legal definition: Amazon sending me random "junk" because I bought something from them is not spam, as I have a prior business relationship with them and I probably left some box checked and started getting their e-mails... yet these people don't think "ok, I guess I don't want that and I'll stop Amazon sending it", nor do they even think "ok, that's what kill files are for: I'll just make it so e-mails like this one get filtered by my e-mail infrastructure"... instead, you see rants about "how dare someone send me e-mail" and then they abuse the shared resource of a spam filter by marking it as spam :/. I sign up for these things. I actually like receiving e-mail marketing updates from some companies, and I essentially never dislike it: but the anti-spam blok are ruining shared spam filters by marking stuff that isn't spam as spam. And this is yet another great example: the tool Hustle is extremely close to the thing that Student Activist Network wanted--they have a ton of different tags that people use to specify interests and then do delivery decisions based on filters--and it doesn't deserve the top post being "how dare someone send me a text message": if nothing else, it scares people off of building stuff like this for fear of retribution from people like that poster, and that's bad for people who are sufficiently organized as to not freak out if someone dares to send them stuff.
This last election was brutal for my phone. Every day for two weeks I got atleast 1 text and sometimes 5 reminding me to vote for some particular candidate or issue.
I don't know how my number got on these lists, but I replied STOP to every one of them.
Yeah, something tells me I don't want to receive random text messages from "X with Z for Congress" inviting me to rallies. My reply to them would be considerably less polite than the one shown in their screenshot.
Due to the TCPA rules in the US, the penalties for just missing a few details are high enough many companies just avoid it altogether. I guess this could be an attempt at a loophole since people are doing it "manually." On the other hand, political stuff gets an exemption.
Overall I wouldn't be worried about SMS. The economics don't make sense either with the front end cost or the long term penalties, and soon everyone will be on a third party messaging platform anyways.
A spam distribution platform is not a defensible business. In a year someone will come along that does it better and cheaper. There is just no long term value.
If the recipient explicitly asks you (or your partners) to text them this and that, and you text them this and that, you're not a spammer. Anything more and you've become a spammer. Seriously. Not cool. Receiving a spam text costs me a postage stamp each time. Buy your own postage stamps.
I got texts from 'For Our Future' before the Nov 8th general election, that appear to have been sent from this service, or similar. The first was signed by 'Carlos' and the second was signed by 'Matt' - for the talk of personalization and how effective that is for text, the discontinuity was jarring. (They came from the same number).
My other caveat with the piece: "The Hillary campaign ended up building their own clone of Hustle called “Megaphone,” though clearly that didn’t quite work."
The success of a SMS engagement app is measured in getting people to go to the polls and vote, not winning the election. As I've written about previously here, getting voters to believe in your cause is a different matter.
Spam issues aside, I am curious why they are using Twilio, which is a (relatively) expensive proposition. Rather, I'd have the app send the messages directly from the user's number. The app could then upload all sent/received messages to the sever and have all of the same benefits. None of this would be a problem on Android. On iOS it's a little more tricky since SMS access is locked down, but incoming iOS SMS can be read indirectly by reading device notifications. So it could be done.
I'd never heard of this, but it seems like a pretty innovative solution. It's refreshing to see money go to apps/ideas that actually add something new to social media.
Good question. Hustle tries its best to only work with organizations that are reaching out to people who actually want to hear from them.
If you receive a message you don't want you can ask to be removed. You'll instantly be opted out of receiving messages from that organization in the future. Also, like all SMS based tools, if you reply with the word "STOP" you'll never hear from them again.
> Hustle tries its best to only work with organizations that are reaching out to people who actually want to hear from them
But I can still receive unsolicited texts, correct? If organization X discovers my phone number, they can add it to their distribution list without my consent?
We texted a large portion of the United States so I apologize if you happened to get caught in the crossfire. Better than someone knocking on your door or calling during supper though right?
> Better than someone knocking on your door or calling during supper though right?
Please don't pitch yourself as a lesser of two evils. And I can at least cuss out / slam the door on a solicitor. And they aren't going to wake me up in the middle of the night.
Follow up question: do you respect the 'Do not call' registry?
This is not a smart thing to say if you hope to continue to sell to progressive political campaigns. Door-to-door canvassing is the most effective organizing medium [0]; by disparaging it, you come across as completely out of touch with the field Hustle is entering.
You have a useful product that will appeal to a number of people (on the sending side). But please don't delude yourself into believing that you have a product that make the world better for all of the millions of recipients that somehow ended up in your databases.
A global opt-out is the absolute least you can do.
"Also, like all SMS based tools, if you reply with the word "STOP" you'll never hear from them again."
Or, it will result in your number being tagged as "confirmed as valid # as of (date)", making your number even more valuable to spammers. The recipient can't be sure which.
And don't play dumb, randomly texting someone "Go Vote!" is absolutely spam. Texting someone because some sign-up form had automatic opt-in is equally spammy.