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I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

alexanderell.is

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Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#31

Post by lostdog »

kayxspre wrote: post #25
grose wrote: post #6

I've noticed this in social networks as well. If you don't get enough transactional notifications for a while they start making up fake ones like Twitter's "in case you missed this Tweet", Facebook's "[someone] posted for the first time in a while", all the while lighting up the notifications badge. Leads to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario in which I stop trusting notifications entirely and just ignore them, possibly…

It's actually possible to fine-tune it by category of notification (Settings > Notifications, either in app or on the web). I turned off Reminder, Friend Updates, and People You May Know, leaving only the notification on things I interact with or things friends brought to my attention.

Lots of companies dump all notifications into the same bucket, either out of laziness, or purposefully to make it less likely you turn off their spam notifications (looking at you Oculus).

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#32

Post by webmobdev »

dahart wrote: post #2

In email land, the terms for helpful vs promotional are "transactional email" for the helpful stuff (e.g., https://mailchimp.com/help/about-transactional-email/ ) and "marketing email" for the promotional ones. There are channels to report abuse if it's bad, not to mention just leaving reviews and mentioning why.

Had similar ideas - I share the author's frustration in India, the delivery apps and banking apps are the worst culprits.

I wonder if the regulators can be asked to extend the "Do Not Call" registry to include barring such app notifications? For example, the National Do Not Call Registry in my country has now been renamed to National Customer Preference Register (NCPR). This now gives indians more fine-grained options to choose what kind of marketing calls we want to bar or receive:

> “Transactional message” means a message triggered by a transaction performed by the subscriber, who is also the sender’s customer, provided such a message is sent within 30 minutes of the transaction being performed and is directly related to it. Provided that the transaction may be a banking transaction, delivery of OTP, purchase of goods or services, etc. ... “Unsolicited commercial communication or UCC” means any commercial communication that is neither as per the consent nor as per registered preference(s) of recipient, but shall not include: (i)Any transactional message or transactional voice call ...

Source: TRAI regulation - https://trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/DraftUCCRegulation29...

They can extend this to mobile OS notifications and ask Google, Apple, Samsung etc. (mobile OS makers) to ensure that all promotional messages through such notifications are blocked, and only "transactional messages" are allowed.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#33

Post by pmoriarty »

grose wrote: post #6

I've noticed this in social networks as well. If you don't get enough transactional notifications for a while they start making up fake ones like Twitter's "in case you missed this Tweet", Facebook's "[someone] posted for the first time in a while", all the while lighting up the notifications badge. Leads to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario in which I stop trusting notifications entirely and just ignore them, possibly…

This is one thing I actually like on android: you have fine gained control over not only which apps can send notifications but also which kinds of notifications a particular app can send.

So it's usually easy to just turn off all the annoying ones, while keeping the useful ones.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#34

Post by jraph »

This is one of the many aspect of why it is important to have control on your computing device. Fight for it!

(And yes, if I can't find an open source app for a service, I won't use it. I'm fine and very happy in my life, I don't miss any specific thing, and yes, no useless notification indeed. Try it!)

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#35

Post by lysium »

I wish there was a fine grain control for Teams notifications.

The amount of messages I get that do not need my immediate attention and/or could have been an email is astounding.

I turned off notifications for Teams as a result and hope that people will call me if it is really urgent.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#36

Post by b112 »

ianbutler wrote: post #3

I was saying this yesterday, LinkedIn, as an example, sends me the most inane notifications as do many apps trying to steal my time. I pay LinkedIn 100 dollars a month, those notifications should serve me, not the other way around. I really don't care about some low substance content written by someone who I'm neither connected with nor follow.

I was on the fence about a premium account, but thanks for this info.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#37

Post by teh64 »

While it is a quite a bit more work to get working correctly, I imagine you could cobble something together with iOs' focus modes [0] and shortcuts [1] automation (where shortcuts can change the focus mode). Just put everything you want all the time in allowed apps, and then disable the focus mode when the required notifications are needed.

You can also automate "when app X is opened, select focus mode" [2], so maybe the workflow would be:

When app with annoying notifications is opened (i.e. is needed), disable focus mode. Then reenable focus mode 1 hour later through automation.

Still more annoying than having some kind of built in thing, but shortcuts does really enable fixing a lot of annoying things (especially in iOS[3]).

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212608

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios

[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/676204/how-to-automatically-launch...

[3] why doesn't the quick action for bluetooth turn off bluetooth? so annoying. So I wrote an shortcuts button, that I click instead.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#38

Post by stormbrew »

kayxspre wrote: post #25
grose wrote: post #6

I've noticed this in social networks as well. If you don't get enough transactional notifications for a while they start making up fake ones like Twitter's "in case you missed this Tweet", Facebook's "[someone] posted for the first time in a while", all the while lighting up the notifications badge. Leads to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario in which I stop trusting notifications entirely and just ignore them, possibly…

It's actually possible to fine-tune it by category of notification (Settings > Notifications, either in app or on the web). I turned off Reminder, Friend Updates, and People You May Know, leaving only the notification on things I interact with or things friends brought to my attention.

It doesn't matter what you set any of these things to, if you leave your account idle for a while you'll start getting made up notifications again to try to draw you back in. Both Facebook and Twitter do this, though ime Facebook's tend to work better just because I have marginally more reason to care about any given person on my FB feed than the much more eclectic set of people my Twitter is connected to.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#39

Post by b3morales »

ajkjk wrote: post #26

I always relish in uninstalling apps when this happens but I hope they have stats somewhere that show: "oh, we sent this annoying marketing notification and an uninstall happens", and I hope some analyst is finding that pattern in their data and telling people about it. But I have to assume the answer is, 'probably not', given that nothing seems to change.

There's no uninstall event on iOS, and I believe the same is true of Android, so they won't see it directly. Disabling notifications is more likely to be noticed.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#40

Post by gpfunke »

I think a couple others have said this already, but I know when I was sending out push notifications at my previous job, you would add a "channel" for the notification for this exact reason. Then users could block that specific channel without blocking the really useful ones (at least on Android)
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