Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

nbcnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 438 posts

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

#91

Post by mkl95 »

jethro_tell wrote: post #65
mkl95 wrote: post #3

I get phone prompts of random work stuff 24/7. At least the stuff I got as a teenager was meaningful.

Limit work app notifications then? I don't get email updates for work accounts, limit slack notifications and still put everything in a work profile. When I'm not working, I turn everything off but my pager. If you need me after my working hours feel free to page me, if IRS jot important enough to page then you'll have to wait until I get back to my desk.

I muted a ton of useless Slack channels everyone is expected to be in, but some bot notifications somehow get through. It got worse lately which I assume is an Android or Slack bug, or both. Slack + bad management is the ultimate job enshittifier.

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

#92

Post by dataflow »

alexanderchr wrote: post #79
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…

It is a breach of trust. I give apps access to my immediate attention so they can notify me of things that need my attention. Not for telling me about their new features or some crappy partner deal. For this reason I have a one strike policy for apps. One marketing notification and permissions are revoked. Missing out on surprisingly little although it has made me stop using some services entirely.

Starbucks is like this. They deliberately bundle together "Promotions & Order Status" to make sure you receive their junk.

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

#93

Post by olalonde »

foooorsyth wrote: post #55
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe they could use the click-to-dismiss ratio as a spam signal? Or even speed-to-dismiss (people probably tend to dismiss spam notifications more quickly).

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

#94

Post by swayvil »

maxrecursion wrote: post #67
sergiomattei wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You handed your 11 year old a smartphone? That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.

My kids are 6 and 2. Right now the wife and I are trying to hold off getting them phones until they are driving. I'm sure that could change when they're in middle school and high school, and whining because all their friends have phones. But, I'm going to try my best to hold the line.

When you buy your kid a smartphone you are literally inviting a squad of marketing PhDs to stalk him 24-7.

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

#95

Post by lolinder »

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…

> in the hands of a kid, today's phone technology and it's inability to stop this crap it's the incarnation of evil.

I'm going to be that guy: this honestly just sounds like you're abdicating your parental responsibility and placing the blame on the tech. Yes, the tech is bad, but there's no reason why your kid should be subjected to the full weight of its awfulness besides that you let him.

Step one is to question whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age. I understand feeling the need to have them be able to reach you, and pay phones and school landlines are less accessible than they once were. But why a smartphone? Peer pressure is not a good enough answer.

If there is a compelling reason for a smartphone (like the other commenter whose school bus system inexplicably requires kids to have an app) then iOS has pretty robust parental controls from what I understand, but I personally would go further and buy an Android phone and install even stronger controls. There are FOSS Android apps that allow you to block everything except for a few whitelisted apps, and there are others that can impose time limits.

A pretty simple combination of apps can create an experience that is suitable to any age, gradually enabling more functionality as you trust him more. We've even done this with our 4-year-old and an old tablet, giving him access to Khan Academy Kids with a time limit.

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

#96

Post by haltist »

swayvil wrote: post #86
haltist wrote: post #17

Sometimes I will be having a conversation with someone and then their phone will buzz or make some sound and the person's attention will shift entirely to the phone. I don't think people realize the effect these gadgets have on their cognition. I have a phone but it is always on silent. I've decided that it is not acceptable to remotely hijack my attention. No notification on my phone sent by some corporation is ever…

Why is the phone always automatically higher priority than the guy you're talking to? Seems messed up. What's the psychology with that? Is it a FOMO thing? Should we feel insulted?

Good question. I have no idea why people allow their attentionto be hijacked by algorithms. My guess is they just don't realize what is happening.

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

#97

Post by aidos »

jethro_tell wrote: post #54
aidos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s even worse than that - every class has a parent led WhatsApp group set up where people then regurgitate the same info into the chat.

I suggested maybe a calendar instead but got the standard “it’s all too hard” responses.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

015a wrote: post #60
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!"…

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by underyx »

015a wrote: post #60
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!"…

Another disgusting thing they do is push promo notifications with the title “1 new match?” where the question mark is the only difference from an actual app notification.

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

#100

Post by jacquesm »

ryandrake wrote: post #74
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…

> 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' that ends up being nonsense but you're not able to block it because one day an actually important message might show up. > Tech should serve us This problem isn't really the tech, it's the people behind these messages. Complain to them. You shouldn't be getting "OM…

I agree it is a people problem but: the people are ignoring you and the tech is just asking for abuse and that tech too was implemented by a bunch of people who are ignoring you. So absent an outright block on all such messages with the significant risk that one day you'll miss something important there isn't all that much that you can do. Complaining certainly doesn't seem to work (at least: it hasn't worked for me) and the only thing that happened in terms of change is that there now are two portals (and two apps...) to be used because half the teachers refuses to switch to the new one. It is frankly incredible how little attention is given to usability and respect for the user when the user is part of a captive audience. Short of changing schools there is not much that you can do and that isn't an option for a variety of reasons.
Post reply on HN