On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers

Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at registration. Delaying it like this, claiming “suspicious activity” is hard to see any other way than how I described it.

Twitter has massive data on your interests but collects only minimal information about you vs, say, Facebook which has your name, birthday etc etc. I would also argue that Twitter has BETTER interest data than Facebook b/c you are constantly interacting with thousands of tweets a day across multiple dimensions. Facebook tends to be your family and a couple pages you happened to like.

If they get your phone number, they get all of the available "data in the cloud" about you e.g. income, purchasing preferences etc. Cross reference the interests with that cloud data and you have a very precise target profile to sell to advertisers.

Some VoIP providers do a PAYG model, so you can choose from any number of phone numbers, regional, local landlines or from mobile numbers for free and only pay when you make a call or answer their answerphone.

Now obviously Twitter will send text messages so you never incur a cost from the VoIP provider.

So how does a phone number solve bot activity?

I don't know how the implementation works, if theres a way to check for virtual vs. real number, but some sms verification service provider seems to have successfully implemented a filter on Google Voice

Implementing (no opt in) 2FA on sites where that level of security is not really warranted is just a ploy to get data that can be resold in my opinion.

Instead, they end up filling their database with countless unused accounts created by those who gave up?

I had to make a new MS account to migrate a 2nd minecraft account. The account has only ever been used from the game launcher, and they have the analytics that the account was created for the migration. But apparently there was "suspicious activity" that violates TOS and they auto locked it, and rather than contact the gmail address I used for the account, they demand a phone number.

Tbf, I'm considering just raising this with the authorities, given a lot of relevant authorities, as not everyone migrating an account will be ab adult, and asking for kids phone numbers seems like a GDPR slamdunk.

Its weird because they have to know that hurting Java edition is just stabbing the most evangelical members of the community. The ones that built it up and developed so much of the word of mouth marketing.

My alternative isn't switching to the non-Java edition—it's finally getting around to looking into open source clones. I'm riiiiight on the edge of pushing my kids into one of those instead.