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

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

#131

Post by standardUser » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

almatabata wrote: post #123

standardUser wrote: post #6

I think it's vital to strictly manage what notifications we allow our phones to give us. Unfortunately, I've noticed a trend where apps are becoming less cooperative. Many apps will have a single all-or-nothing notification setting. Others have dozens of vague, poorly-labelled categories. And all of this is hidden several clicks deep in configuration settings. The result is that we can't be sure which notifications t…

They probably did all of this to increase some KPI. The more fine grained authorization system problem resulted in less interactions. A lot of applications have too many incentives to keep you engaged as long as possible. I think apple has a nice setting where you can disable all notifications after a certain time slot in the evening. But this only works in the evenings, during the day they can still spam all day lon…

A notification management system sounds like something that needs to exist, but how would it work if companies don't adhere to standards? I don't see any way out of this that doesn't first involve legislation.

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

#132

Post by tivert » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

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…

> Tech should serve us

It should, but it's becoming more and more obvious that it won't and can't. Literally every economic incentive it pushing towards 1) making it crappier until it's just good enough to buy, 2) maximally exploiting its users.

The market won't save us, because a competitor who tries to gain market-share by not doing that crap will eventually turn around and join in the fun, once it's in their interest.

Mobile internet may end up as being a giant mistake. It opens up an entire superhighway of enshittification, makes us more dependent on centralized control, and doesn't provide a much better communication experience that the telephone network.

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

#133

Post by sixstringtheory » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #111

maxrecursion wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love that option, but highschool mandates a smartphone, go figure: let's give attention deficit teenagers an always on distraction device and then complain about how hard it is to keep them focused.

Granted I’m still very early in my parenting years but if my child’s high school requires a smartphone I feel like I’m going to be viewed as a kook because I’ll turn up to meetings shouting at them about how they’ve failed the kids from a social development standpoint.

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

#134

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:53 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #115

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That decision is being made by a person who you should be able to find and share your concern with. Good point, and it generalizes to pretty much all the social problems "created by" tech. The technology is fine . Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech, and/or is applying it in malicious ways. Focusing on ills of technology, while ignoring the people wielding it for wrong, is just a d…

Yes, but good luck getting those people to see things your way.

I would like to get journalists to see things my way, so we'd get a little less "oh look at the bad tech" and a little more of "look at the C-suite of companies X, Y and Z employing tech for bad" kind of articles, but I get the feeling that I won't get through to them either. Something about things your salary depends on not understanding, etc.

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

#135

Post by unixhero » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:55 PM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #92

alexanderchr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PUMPKIN SPICE LATTE ON SALE NOWWW

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

#136

Post by bertil » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:55 PM UTC

jacobsimon wrote: post #23

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…

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

Apple would be gaining so much goodwill and transforming the industry if they asked for feedback on notifications, and trained an ML system to decide which one to show.

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

#137

Post by rambambram » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

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

Replace Android here with - let's say - a narcissistic person. The same sentence would still make sense. Something like "I love how my narcissistic partner requires an extremely granular control so I can adjust their level of disruption to me."

I'm not making fun of you, it's just that your sentence made the similarities so painfully clear to me.

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

#138

Post by bertil » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:59 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…

This is entirely due to people not testing the impact of too many marketing notifications on whether people keep their notifications on—partially because Apple doesn’t share that information with developers, so they have to guess based on who comes from a notification with UTM tags.

Sending too many emails or too many notifications has an evident and enormous cost when you measure it (in lost opportunities that effective notifications could bring you). If your employer does not know what the threshold should be and does not routinely cancel certain notifications or emails because they don’t meet that bar, they are losing a lot of money. It’s probably the most accessible and impactful project you could work on if you want to prove your value.

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

#139

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

sixstringtheory wrote: post #133

jacquesm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love that option, but highschool mandates a smartphone, go figure: let's give attention deficit teenagers an always on distraction device and then complain about how hard it is to keep them focused.

Granted I’m still very early in my parenting years but if my child’s high school requires a smartphone I feel like I’m going to be viewed as a kook because I’ll turn up to meetings shouting at them about how they’ve failed the kids from a social development standpoint.

You'll be battling 29 other parents as well who see their phone as a necessity for life.

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

#140

Post by mock-possum » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 8:01 PM UTC

This stuff is so hard for me to understand. I put actual time and effort into avoiding those notifications - i try to give new apps a fair shake, but when spam notifications start to show, I slowly ratchet back notification privileges until eventually I just uninstall the app, especially if I’ve disabled notification permissions and it keeps begging me to re enable them.

To me, this sounds like teens - people, really, because plenty of people ‘somehow’ wind up in this exact situation, where ‘somehow’ there’s just too many notifications on their phone to keep up with, as if it’s some sort of inexorable force of nature that it’s futile to resist. It just comes off as such bullshit to my ears, it’s nothing more than unwillingness to take responsibility for your own choices, and to put effort towards arranging your environment in a way that suits you.

If your phone is doing things you don’t want it to do, your response should never be to just shrug and say “oh well I guess that’s the way things are for me now.”

Given how many times I see that same situation expanded to encompass someone’s entire approach to managing their life in general, I really shouldn’t be surprised - I just cannot understand why taking control of that stuff and working to resist the things you don’t want just does not seem to be a priority for so many people. They just let bad things happen to them. It’s mind boggling.

The fact that teens are struggling with this doesn’t even seem significant to me. This attitude is everywhere regardless of age.