>Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram are spectacular design failures on this point because they assume that every person has a phone number and also that every person has their own private (non-shared) and unique phone number.
No, most people have a phone number and for most people that's their own phone number. That was a tradeoff for them.
>Facebook, Google, etc., require a phone number for verification and believe that it’s sufficiently adequate to thwart spammers.
I am sure that it is one of the most effective ways to thwart spammers, but to say that it's all they do is laughable. What's an alternative, email address? Throwaway emails are a dime a dozen.
>None of the companies mentioned above would agree that excluding people is a goal for them, but they’ve made it so.
They've made excluding people a goal? Are you serious?
I'd argue that it's a reasonable tradeoff if you consider the users vs customers distinction. Many (most?) services want more users because they're either going to pay money directly or they are good targets for advertising. A first world user is valuable, a third world user - not so much (literally - if you look at costs for clickthroughs or user acquisition or ad revenue per user, there's easily a hundredfold difference).
People who are poor enough to not have a phone of their own are probably not going to bring you much revenue, so it's no big deal if they can't access your service. I mean, a company isn't building that service to serve users, it's building that service only to earn money from these users.
No, most people have a phone number and for most people that's their own phone number. That was a tradeoff for them.
>Facebook, Google, etc., require a phone number for verification and believe that it’s sufficiently adequate to thwart spammers.
I am sure that it is one of the most effective ways to thwart spammers, but to say that it's all they do is laughable. What's an alternative, email address? Throwaway emails are a dime a dozen.
>None of the companies mentioned above would agree that excluding people is a goal for them, but they’ve made it so.
They've made excluding people a goal? Are you serious?