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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

#51

Post by sonicggg »

dguo wrote: post #23

My rule is: if I get a single notification that I find useless, I'll immediately disable that notification channel (I'm on Android; I'm not sure if iOS has a concept of channel-specific settings) for that app. Even if the channel can include useful notifications, as the article discusses. If the app doesn't bother to categorize its notifications into channels at all, I turn off its notifications entirely, and I won't…

I use a similar system for Slack notifications. Got an unwanted @here call? Mute channel entirely.

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

#52

Post by floren »

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.

Expedia is really bad about calling all their promotions "transactional emails". You see, once upon a time in the distant past, I used Expedia, so based on that transaction surely I care deeply about how "A more rewarding travel experience is coming in February": http://jfloren.net/content/expedia.png

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

#53

Post by MrStonedOne »

UkrainianJew wrote: post #45
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…

>I really wish companies let us turn this kind of thing off Well, if you are not paying for the service with your money, you are paying with your attention. And this is the mechanism to extract additional attention from you, and it works very well.

No post body was provided.

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

#54

Post by saghm »

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 started happening enough on the Twitter app for me that I just ended up uninstalling the app. My account still exists, and maybe there are some real notifications there, but it's probably been close to a year since I actually checked.

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

#55

Post by gnicholas »

kmonsen wrote: post #42
b112 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the draw of premium? Cannot see anything there that would be more then marginal useful for me.

I believe if you do too many searches in a month they force you onto premium.

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

#56

Post by emsy »

tsuujin wrote: post #13
emsy wrote: post #8

Isn’t the justification of Apple that they have a monopoly on the App Store so they can protect users from notification abuse? In reality this is not enforced at all and even Apple themselves will send you ads.

No? The walled garden is a safeguard against malicious apps, not against marketing shenanigans.

They explicitly state in their developer agreement not to use notifications for ads.

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

#57

Post by gnicholas »

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.

LinkedIn is surely one of the worst. They are constantly creating new categories of notifications, which you have to explicitly opt-out of. Guess what? If I didn't want any platform-initiated notifications (engagement hacks, not based on anyone trying to contact me or interacting with my content), then I probably don't want this new invented category of notification.

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

#58

Post by Nextgrid »

UkrainianJew wrote: post #45
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…

>I really wish companies let us turn this kind of thing off Well, if you are not paying for the service with your money, you are paying with your attention. And this is the mechanism to extract additional attention from you, and it works very well.

Disagreed. This garbage happens even with paid services, in fact the service in the article is a restaurant chain.

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

#59

Post by clumpthump »

rutierut wrote: post #9

As someone who travels a bit I’ve got quite some food delivery and ride share apps on my phone. The marketing notifications are driving me crazy, I regularly miss relevant notifications because Grab, Uber, Uber Eats, Glovo, Bolt, and Cabify are all sending me almost daily notifications with some sort of cringe content trying to nudge me to take a cab/order food. Especially Uber Eats and Glovo are bad.

It's definitely annoying that users can't opt-in only to the types of notifications they want on installation, but Uber and Uber Eats are not guilty of what Starbucks is doing in the article (at least on Android); you can disable all notifications besides "Taking a Ride" and "Your Order" notifications.

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

#60

Post by zamadatix »

theamk wrote: post #10

I have a pretty good idea on how to fix this (and many similar) problems: "hibernate app" option. Its a new app state where app icon icon has some mark (like being semi-grayed out) and all the background app services are disabled (tracking, promotional popups, periodic wakeups, etc...). The app is only un-hibernated if user explicitly clicks on it, it cannot do it by itself. The app can be hibernated by long-press me…

For Android I think the only thing needed for this is for disabled apps to show as grayed out in the launcher instead of hidden. I wonder if that's information available to launchers or only available in the system app menu.
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