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

Phone.wtf

phone.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 111 posts

Re: Phone.wtf

#11

Post by predictabl3 »

Oh I looove this. I did this right after I quit Twitter. My mental health is streets ahead of where it used to be. Plus it's so much nicer to plan a call and do it over a reliable internet calling platform instead of the "phone".

If I had kids, maybe the "nothing is urgent" would be different, but I also know modern parents can't fathom the fact that I was never reachable during school, ever, and that was perfectly normal and fine.

Android let's you customize DND as well, so I don't even see new or existing notifications unless I swipe down. This means if I get my phone out to look something up, I'm not going to get distracted for 5 minutes.

Modern phones are a plague. Dates, parents, siblings, coworkers everyone seems to be oblivious to how often they will just drop out of a conversation midsentence because their phone buzzed or beeped. I just stop talking until they're done now, which inevitably makes them uncomfortable. Sorry, it's rude AF and I get tired of repeating myself.

Re: Phone.wtf

#12

Post by LoganDark »

ams92 wrote: post #8
0xffff2 wrote: post #4

Is this a really problem? It's vanishingly rare in my experience to here a phone ring these days. Rude people intentionally playing music or other media without headphones is a much larger but still rare phenomenon.

> Is this a really problem? No it is not for a normal well adjusted person.

This comment comes off as claiming that neurodivergence is a bad thing.

Re: Phone.wtf

#13

Post by rolodato »

One disgusting trend I see with many phone apps is notification spam with no fine-grained option to disable them without potentially disabling transactional notifications. Ride-sharing and delivery apps are particularly annoying for this.

I remember the time when phone OSes did not have notification categories but it’s not a useful feature if app developers don’t implement them.

Re: Phone.wtf

#14

Post by holmesworcester »

I support most of this, but the one thing I definitely want my phone to ring for is if I have a scheduled meeting on Zoom or some such.

Missing those meetings or being more than a few minutes late always feels terrible, and it's so easy to do when I'm heads-down working on something.

I would vehemently oppose a ban on public ringing for this reason--and also because it's needlessly authoritarian! If people want to ring at a similar volume to a person speaking or a baby crying, let them ring.

Re: Phone.wtf

#15

Post by squeegee_scream »

I'm 100% onboard with the notifications thing. My phone only makes noise for phone calls, reminders, and calendar events. All other notifications are silent. In addition to that, I only have a couple of apps that display number of unread messages. A few times I've had to give advice to a friend or coworker about managing their notifications because they were drive to distraction by them. It's mind boggling to me that people don't figure this out on their own.

Re: Phone.wtf

#17

Post by r0b1n »

uoaei wrote: post #7
maltalex wrote: post #2

> No. Nothing is an urgency. Except some things are.

If they're that urgent, your process is poorly designed.

Life is poorly designed. Kid had an accident, gotta go to the hospital? Of course that call is urgent.

Even at work, there are things that really are urgent. But those shouldn't occur often, otherwise you would be right, poorly designed process.

Re: Phone.wtf

#18

Post by lucb1e »

unstatusthequo wrote: post #10
maltalex wrote: post #2

> No. Nothing is an urgency. Except some things are.

But when everything is urgent, nothing is.

It's also not like I message my boss before walking to his office, that doesn't make every time someone walks in equally urgent. Sometimes it'll be me asking about lunch, sometimes it'll be the firefighters.

I agree a priority button would be nice when calling someone, to be able to differentiate, but how often do you get interrupted by a phone call during something that you didn't want to be interrupted? For me it's never so uninterruptable that declining the call was an issue; I decline calls maybe twice per year (on a total of maybe a dozen unexpected incoming calls altogether). I'd prefer if it's okay to just pick up a phone and see if someone is reachable.

Post reply on HN