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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

#321

Post by seszett »

tsukikage wrote: post #308
didntcheck wrote: post #287

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?

I happened because the phone operators made SMS a paid feature, while Whatsapp over wifi was free. Then the people for whom SMS was not free started using Whatsapp (or Messenger or other apps) and eventually those who used to use SMS switched to the same apps because their contacts were using them.

In some places the switch to these apps took longer (like France, because SMS had been free for a long time) but there is a fundamental asymmetry since SMS is free only for part of the users (so the others will never use it) while the apps are free for everyone. In the end, everyone ends up mostly using these apps.

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

#322

Post by saiya-jin »

robocat wrote: post #152
swayvil wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When is the right time for your kid to learn how to deal with modern life problems? You can protect your kid for a while, but sooner or later your protection becomes a bigger problem.

What brutal modern life problems require smart phone with unlimited access?

Most problems we face in our lives haven't changed a zilch - its simply interacting with people for whatever reasons. You don't need phone for that, in fact you should first work on handling face-to-face interactions and only then move to remote ones.

Kids can grok how phone and app works in few weeks through and through and much faster than you or me currently, so that they are not missing anything if they start later. There is very little to 'learn' by further usage of it, just feeding addictions.

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

#323

Post by OscarDC »

tsukikage wrote: post #308
didntcheck wrote: post #287

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?

From my experience in France at least, nobody relies on SMS anymore and less and less people on regular calls, it all goes through Whatsapp.

Even I am guilty of that for both SMS and calls, having a single featureful app with contacts ordered by the most recent discussions descending (as in my country SMS is largely replaced by Whatsapp) leads to less friction than having to scroll through my actual phone's contact.

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

#324

Post by dalore »

donmcronald wrote: post #179
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.

That's exactly what I do! Google and Apple could instantly fix the problem (of co-mingling essential and marketing notifications) if they wanted to . The current situation is like getting opted in to "street signs and flashing billboards". It's stupid.

Google has this. You can make notification types as silent or normal or priority. Notifications from the same app have groupings of what type of notifications they will send. And you pick which ones you want to be notified about.

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

#325

Post by offices »

nathancahill wrote: post #273
squeaky-clean wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram for me. I don't use it much but have a few friends who message through it, or at least send some memes. If I enable notifications for that, I get daily notifications that someone I might know has joined Instagram, someone I know posted to their story... It's about 1:4 real notifications vs "Please spend more time on our app"

IG (and FB) at least have decent fine-tuning controls.

Unfortunately, they ignore them. Threads spams you with these notifications regardless of what you turn off.

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

#326

Post by mavhc »

jethro_tell wrote: post #231
mavhc wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We should have an app for our school, it's only $x00" Me: What does it do? Calendar and notifications about new posts Me: The website already does that, there's a button to click to subscribe to the calendar, another to subscribe to notifications, and you can "install" the website if you want, all with open standards Surprising, I actually won the argument and they didn't waste their money.

I mean, the school districts I've had kids in all had Microsoft 365 or gmail for the kids, I assume the staff is in the same system. Its really not that hard to send out invites and searchable emails.

it's parents they're trying to reach

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

#327

Post by offices »

bertil wrote: post #136
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.

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.

>An ML system

Or... a float?

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

#328

Post by offices »

leesalminen wrote: post #20
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…

I, too, have been running my phone on DND as of late and it’s been pretty great. My wife disagrees :). I’m pretty sure iOS focus modes would allow me to configure notifications from my wife to come through while silencing the others but I’ll wait til she tells me :).

My wife hasn't set up focus, so my Signal messages to her don't notify her late at night. That's when I tell her I'm buying new things :)

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

#329

Post by omgmajk »

nathancahill wrote: post #273
squeaky-clean wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instagram for me. I don't use it much but have a few friends who message through it, or at least send some memes. If I enable notifications for that, I get daily notifications that someone I might know has joined Instagram, someone I know posted to their story... It's about 1:4 real notifications vs "Please spend more time on our app"

IG (and FB) at least have decent fine-tuning controls.

As soon as I get to a point where I would normally get zero notifications from FB/IG, they invent a new way to give me a notification. Always.

Usually it's something like "Group x has a new post, click to read it now!" where X is a group I haven't visited in years and would never give me a notification before. So I click "Only get notifications for friends posts in this group" and then it happens again with one-three other random groups the next week.

It's all about trying to get the user to spend the most amount of time in the app.

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

#330

Post by MereInterest »

dalore wrote: post #324
donmcronald wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I do! Google and Apple could instantly fix the problem (of co-mingling essential and marketing notifications) if they wanted to . The current situation is like getting opted in to "street signs and flashing billboards". It's stupid.

Google has this. You can make notification types as silent or normal or priority. Notifications from the same app have groupings of what type of notifications they will send. And you pick which ones you want to be notified about.

Doesn’t this rely on the app developer maintaining the correct labeling of each category? An unethical developer would just mix advertisements into all notification category, while an ethical developer wouldn’t be sending the spurious notifications in the first place.
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