Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds • Hacker News Board

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#51

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

aidos wrote: post #35

jacquesm wrote: post #5

Everybody is. I'm strongly of the opinion that all this 'needy tech' is a net negative and I try hard to keep it out of my life. But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' (which you need to separately logged into, of course the message is so important that it can't be entrusted to mere email, even though the…

I just checked and there are 16 messages from one school in the last 7 days. The other school have managed 11. Those are emails, containing PDFs, containing important dates, if you can find them.

At least they are e-mails. Schools and kindergartens in Poland all switched over to some garbage SaaS that incorporates a half-assed, barely functioning faux-e-mail service, so I have to actually log in to their confusing and ad-infested website every other day and check if the facility sent something new. I would love it if we were using e-mails instead.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#52

Post by jjtheblunt » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

MichaelRo wrote: post #38

My kid (soon to be 11 years old) has this problem and is (almost) driving me nuts. There are three causes of this: 1) He's dumb. Will click and install on any crap he comes by. 2) He doesn't know to operate his phone. Every now and then I take his phone and turn off notifications for the apps I saw that popped them. #3: This one's mysterious to me as well. Somehow they (the notifications) get re-enabled back. I'm dis…

Aren't you able to solve #1, by locking down your kid's ability install anything?

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#53

Post by lostlogin » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

jbverschoor wrote: post #43

jacobsimon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Apple should add a similar distinction between transactional and marketing notifications as we have with email.

There's no way to flag spam / marketing. Uber for example occasionally sends marketing. But you can't really disable notifications. Instead, they (large companies) should just pay x cent per notification to Apple (not the user, because that would be seen as credit, eliminating the purpose)

That might work but what if the value of the spam notification is greater than Apples fee? Then it will carry on.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#54

Post by jethro_tell » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

aidos wrote: post #35

jacquesm wrote: post #5

Everybody is. I'm strongly of the opinion that all this 'needy tech' is a net negative and I try hard to keep it out of my life. But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' (which you need to separately logged into, of course the message is so important that it can't be entrusted to mere email, even though the…

I just checked and there are 16 messages from one school in the last 7 days. The other school have managed 11. Those are emails, containing PDFs, containing important dates, if you can find them.

Yeah, dealing with schools doesn't fill me with hope about our kids future.

Here's a email with a PDF containing important dates and updates about the cursive program.

Lol, great.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#55

Post by foooorsyth » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

downWidOutaFite wrote: post #21

soultrees wrote: post #4

I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes. The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels li…

Snapchat is like this, it's a communication app so you want the notifications on, but they flood it with marketing. And they refuse to use Android's notification "channels" to segment their notifications. Google should start enforcing that in their Play Store reviews.

Android’s notification channels API is clunky, and it’s a completely useless OS feature when there’s zero real spam enforcement at the Play Store level.

I also just think it’s a weird leaky abstraction to bubble up to user space. I’m just imagining my mom looking at a notification channels area in settings. It’s a weird thing to ask users to conceptualize. Also it’s not something you can really enforce at review-time. It would be something Apple and Google would need to constantly monitor — at any time a VC could ask their investees to turn the screws on monetization/engagement and an app could become a spam machine overnight.

Something better would be something like a non-removable option to report individual notifications from any app as spam, kinda like how it works will email. That way, Apple and Google could offload their monitoring overhead to machine learning models and punish companies acting in bad faith whenever there’s enough user frustration to justify punishment

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#56

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

haolez wrote: post #26

root_axis wrote: post #7

One of the things I love about Android is the extremely granular controls on app notifications, it allows me to fine tune the disruption level of particular types of alerts or messages from app to app so that I'm only alerted to stuff I care about. edit: https://i.imgur.com/w3A9Bge.png

It's cool, but some apps (like food delivery apps) conflate all notifications into a single category, probably in an attemp to abuse the system.

It's not just some apps - it's all the major apps, including Google software.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#57

Post by gyrovagueGeist » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #40

LeoPanthera wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. They call them "time sensitive" notifications. You can use the "Focus" feature to delay less important types of notifications into a big batch at a specified time. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212608

It's been asking me about these and from what it tells me on my phone I don't understand what they are getting at. But more importantly, how does it differentiate between "Your delivery has arrived" and "this weekend, 10% off all deliveries paid with mastercard from chase banks"

> But more importantly, how does it differentiate between "Your delivery has arrived" and "this weekend, 10% off all deliveries paid with mastercard from chase banks"

IIUC it is up to the app developer to tag the notifications they generate as time sensitive (or not) for iOS

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#58

Post by sergiomattei » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

MichaelRo wrote: post #38

My kid (soon to be 11 years old) has this problem and is (almost) driving me nuts. There are three causes of this: 1) He's dumb. Will click and install on any crap he comes by. 2) He doesn't know to operate his phone. Every now and then I take his phone and turn off notifications for the apps I saw that popped them. #3: This one's mysterious to me as well. Somehow they (the notifications) get re-enabled back. I'm dis…

You handed your 11 year old a smartphone?

That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#59

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

tazjin wrote: post #48

wodenokoto wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been asking me about these and from what it tells me on my phone I don't understand what they are getting at. But more importantly, how does it differentiate between "Your delivery has arrived" and "this weekend, 10% off all deliveries paid with mastercard from chase banks"

> how does it differentiate Probably through a pinky promise from the developers to call the right APIs.

Probably. And then I would expect the app store review process to check.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#60

Post by 015a » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

soultrees wrote: post #4

I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes. The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels li…

Bumble is really similar and disgusting. By default, notifications are enabled for both messages (which are a pretty good thing to have notifications turned on for) and once or twice a day Peak Cringe marketing push notifications. They have the ability to turn off specific kinds of notifications, but one of the categories is "The Good Stuff: Turning these off means you'll miss out on our most exciting pushes of all!" and I'm not unconvinced that this is actually their daily CTAs to get you back into the app, because none of the other categories cover those.