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Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

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

#311
post #132
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 int…

No need for such pessimism - what can, and will change how things work is the consumer, being smart enough to demand better. See the other comments here, there is a market for responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products. It is just a matter of time IMHO, until the majority of people have enough.

Imagine the food industry 20 years back. It looked like the end of the world - literal poison everywhere you look. Your arguments back then would never foresee today's organic food hype and vegetables craze.

Believe.

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

#313
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…

> I have a phone but it is always on silent Same here, the only time it'll make noise is if my gf calls twice in a row or if there is a national nuclear war alert

How do you set it to notify you if she calls twice in a row?

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

#314

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…

Uber is terrible at it.

The last time I installed Uber, it woke me up in the middle of the night with some useless notification. Immediately uninstalled.

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

#315

One issue with A/B testing something obnoxious like misusing a legitimate notification channel to push marketing is that the metrics only measure the upside. There is no ClickHouse dashboard metric for “infuriated the user”.

Very few companies actively measure the negative impact of their actions. This happens in physical stores as well, run a promotion pushing some product or brand and only measure if that increases sale. It's not easy, actually it's borderline impossible to measure how many you're unintentionally turning way do to your business practices.

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it's online bullshit and not a time-sensitive message from family? I'd never do it mid-sentance, but if I hear my Whatsapp notification tone then I will make a mental note to check that fairly soon, because sometimes it is something important

At what point did society, unprompted and unquestioned, shift to using the Whatsapp phone app for actually important urgent serious things instead of, y'know, SMS or a phone call?

Around the time smartphone and widespread data coverage made it feasible. It, and other services like it, offered a clearly superior experience to SMS/MMS, and RCS arrived way, way too late. As for why a particular service succeeded in a particular market, I imagine it all comes down to marketing, luck, and network effects. WhatsApp is probably not my ideal service (mostly because it uses somewhat device-tied accounts) but it's what 90% of people use

Almost all phone calls I receive are "actual" phone calls though. And SMS still gets plenty of use as the lowest common denominator for new recipients, but in practice over 95% of my received SMS are from computers now

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only that, many of them will be themselves glued to the phones while you execute your elaborate speech about child development, missing your point entirely and consider you some medieval crook during those 2 seconds they will be focusing on you.

Lets not act like parents are stellar in this, because more often than not they aren't and most issues with kids come from this direction (as a parent of small kids I really can't blame anybody else if we mess up something, not at this age)

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

#318
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a phone but it is always on silent Same here, the only time it'll make noise is if my gf calls twice in a row or if there is a national nuclear war alert

How do you set it to notify you if she calls twice in a row?

It's called "allow repeat caller" on android, on my pixel 3a it's under Notifications > do not disturb > People > Calls. From there you can chose the option for all "starred contacts" or individual contacts

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an iOS device, so can’t speak for Google, but I suspect that’s what Apple has been _trying_ to do. The problem is that these apps are essentially adversarial in their notifications. If you have a mechanism for “only the most essential notifications”, then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential” (looking at you Uber). Try to limit their notifications using “only is summary” or disabling them and…

> then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential" That's like getting spam mail from your bank. In the physical world this would be illegal

Not illegal, from what I've heard — someone read the small print of their mortgage agreement, modified it, signed it, the bank person signed the modified agreement, the bank sent junk mail, he pointed out this meant the bank was in breach of contract and given how he'd modified it that he was apparently theoretically entitled to write off the remaining debt.

Apparently that last bit would probably not have survived an actual legal fight, but they never sent him any more junk mail.

(This was pre-GDPR, so perhaps things have changed?)

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

#320

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)

Can you please explain why it would be preferable to have large companies paying x cents per notification to Apple, and not to users?

I don't understand the credit part? Wouldn't some kind of "set your rate" option for the user, allow more individual flexibility? As opposed to a flat fee per notif, sent to Apple?

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