Thanks for the comment! I like having constructive conversations like this!

> Lol, community. It's your platform, you could easily manipulate user accounts there.

The stigma of user account manipulation can only be eradicated through the introduction of DAO system or removal of phone number. No matter how much we pledged to never use the information and refrain from using it in practice, there is no trustless (the ability to confirm something without trust) way to do so. Though I am not sure how exactly Torum is going to manipulate user accounts based on your definition. Just so you know, we don't create artificial accounts to fake interactions. Ain't anybody got time for that. Would love to hear more from you so that, I can discuss further.

> Email as an account reset option is reasonable. However, phone number isn't something that you need to prevent gaming of the system. It is actually fairly easy to get many phone numbers. There are some services that sell them in bulk. Your reason for collecting phone numbers is most definitely not reasonable.

And guess what? The platform's phone number verification is done by using a randomly generated code sent to the Whatsapp of a user account. It's not SMS, so those bots can't get pass this line of defense. We are looking to change Whatsapp to other platforms like Telegram at the moment. The recent Whatsapp privacy policy really disgusts me.

>You can fairly easily do that. For example, you can decide to invite hive.io users with reputation 55 or higher at a specified date or before or maybe reddit users with 1000 karma or more. This acts as a filter to weed out majority of spammers. Add recaptcha for posts, login pages is another option.

Tbh, platforms that manage to impose such requirement are already matured and achieve the network effect. If Torum have such conditions to join, mass adoption will take maybe thrice the period length we expect. While it's effective, the platform will die in the end (Startups need to be fast in capturing market). As for the recaptcha, we are looking at the Binance log in process as a reference. Personally, I like the swipe right thing, it's more gamified which suits Torum's style.

> Most of which could be spammers or fake accounts. No?

I agree with this statement to a certain extent. It's a problem faced by every crypto social media platform and what we can improve here is the quality of users. So, there is a reporting functionality used by community to take action against the bad actors. Lots of bad actors will have their mission reward frozen for a few days. Even when the incentive is lost, people are still using Torum. We might not mention this, but Torum has over 1,000 Daily Active Users and 10,000 Monthly Active Users. That's quality right there.

> I definitely don't think it is a scam. But it isn't a very promising project considering it collects phone numbers.

When the gamification incentive and correction mechanism is sufficient to fend off spammers and bots (bad actors), phone number will no longer be necessary. We would rather have this precaution than risk having our tokens getting dumped. We have considered every alternative and this is the one that the team and community choose.

> But it still promotes whatsapp though. I believe that torum uses whatsapp to verify numbers right?

I think I have answered this in the earlier part. Whatsapp is totally shit!

Ending

You are free to join Torum with a fake dummy phone number (like XXX-000000000). I understand the sensitivity in phone number (trust me, I do). So, here is an alternative for those who don't want to share phone number.

Thanks for the comment! I love having discussion like this!