Tell HN: Twilio support replies with hallucinated features

Out of curiosity, what do you actually need out of a VoIP/SMS provider beyond "send and receive SIP" and "send and receive SMS"?

I'll give you that SIP is quite complex to deal with (aka the existing tooling around it is shit - the least shit is SipSorcery in C# but requires quite a bit of low-level code to get anywhere), but SMS is trivial as it maps nicely to HTTP's request/response paradigm. Just write whatever logic you want in a PHP/etc script, drop it on shared hosting, and enjoy better uptime (your shared hosting provider doesn't have the budget to keep paying techbros to constantly mess with the system, so it will be more stable).

It’s this. You went to a buffet but all they have is shit pie.

"Commode-ification" - when everything is shit, so it doesn't matter what you choose.

The conspiracy of service degradation: as long as every other provider sucks, the consumer never can expect better.

Alpha tested with lightbulbs but is now a clear strategy taught to MBAs

Amen! This touches on my biggest frustration. Product marketing doesn't market anymore. For so many products you can't find any specific information unless you go look at reddit or reviews or something. Half the time you can't even see a real picture of the item in a room or serving its purpose because listings are so filled with photoshopped garbage. They want you to spend sometimes hundreds or thousands on something without even being told an accurate set of dimensions or ever seeing it actually in use.

It's really disgusting. The problem is sometimes you need these things. We were recently shopping for an oven and it was like that. Lots of photoshopped images, it says "5 burner" but doesn't actually mention the 5th burner is just a warming burner except if you can see the one picture where the dial looks different from the others.

It's just ok for corporations to scam people now it seems. I don't know what to do about it but I'm very sick of dealing with it.

I tend to disagree. While there are definitely monopolies/oligopoly for every domain, I'm actually constantly impressed with the very long tail of other providers available in that area.

Whenever I am looking for a new solution to a need at work, I would go to sites like g2.com to look at the lists of the most popular ones, and would then typically skim reviews of the top ~10, and more fully evaluate the top ~3. But there are often hundreds of alternatives that I haven't given a chance to, and I know that it's my <s>laziness</s> need to manage my limited time that's promoting this oligopoly, rather than any particular issue with all of those other providers down the list.

I don't see how legislation can help here, other than picking a provider for me. If anything, this is actually a place where I feel that AI tools, and particularly ChatGPT's Deep Research can research a lot more of the alternatives than I as a human would have time for. But that of course has its own set of issues, and I really don't know what the solution is. We no longer live in that world where you just use that provider who lives down the street.

looking at their wikipedia page they raised $100M decades ago to make that company. it doesn't seem like a good bet to raise money like that just to compete with an already well-known name in the space. maybe you could do it cheaper today, but what's the point? it's probably higher EV to just build something new in a different space and own that market.

i don't think this has to do with trust-busting i think this has to do with there being lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.

but regarding the principle of what you said, especially with tech markets, the government has a vested interest in keeping these companies as monopolistic as possible. a monopoly is always at risk of being taken down by the government, so the government has good leverage over them. with this leverage they can demand all sorts of things from them they otherwise couldn't like warrantless access to user-data and there's nothing the company can do about it. even if the leadership cared about protecting that data. its a much lower administrative cost to abuse one large company that it is to abuse hundreds of more competitive smaller ones.

It was back when militant labor presented an actual threat to the owning class. Now they know they can act with impunity, and they do.

I had this same experience. Twilio is not interested in the small internal tool customer - do mass marketing or go away.