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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

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> 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 distraction.

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

#102

Post by maxerickson »

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…

Amazon Music lets you turn off notifications but has blocking modal advertisements for upgrades or whatever (so like when you go in to start a playlist it makes you dismiss an advertisement first).

I gripe at them pretty consistently and the various customer service people don't even know the basics of how the app functions. I'm sure someone is really proud that their campaign to harass all of their paying users has led to some number of subscription upgrades though.

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

#103

Post by drewg123 »

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've taken to just disabling all notifications from food delivery apps when I don't have an order pending.

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

#104

Post by foooorsyth »

olalonde wrote: post #93
foooorsyth wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Maybe, but I think playing with meta-metrics is a dangerous game. I know plenty of people that just let notifications pile on. Some people have weird flows — e.g. see notification, don’t interact with it directly, then manually navigate to and enter the app that notified.

I really just think individual notifications (not apps) just need an explicit “this is spam” report button.

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

#105

Post by mr_mitm »

gambiting wrote: post #76
mr_mitm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On android, each app's notifications are categorized. For, say, Uber, I can enable the obvious useful notifications and can disable promotional notifications. Presumably Google penalizes ignoring or abusing this system.

Hahahahaha - sorry, the mere suggestion that Google cares enough about this to "penalize" anyone who ignores this system is actually really funny to me. No, of course they don't do any such thing. The system is entirely and completely optional, and developers have long ago realized that actually using it is to their own detriment, because users will just block the marketing notifications but leave the important ones,…

Huh. It really worked well for me so far. Interesting.

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

#107

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Same happens with phone calls themselves. People on the other side seem to assume they take automatic precedence over whatever else you were doing.

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

#108

Post by wholinator2 »

jeffbee wrote: post #28
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.

> it's a communication app so you want the notifications on That doesn't follow, IMO. I have tons of communication platforms that aren't allowed to notify.

Well for college kids and young people you need to know if an event is being created or you're being invited somewhere. I don't want to check my phone every 30 minute throughout the day and nobody around me is rigid enough to plan everything days in advance. Sometimes you wanna go on an impromptu road trip or to a party or maybe there's a test you didn't know about and the study group is organizing a session. Maybe you just wanna be a part of the conversion when you're friend group starts taking instead of always pitching in hours later.

Typing this all out, these are all young people things so i don't expect someone with kids and a mortgage to have the same experience but imagine if your sms app was littered with ads and you couldn't turn off their notifications without missing messages from your children needing assistance. That's basically the type of dirty attention capture these companies are engaging in.

If you don't understand why someone would use snapchat or other image based social messaging apps then you won't understand this particular issue as you don't have it.

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

#110

Post by root_axis »

haolez wrote: post #26
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

It's cool, but some apps (like food delivery apps) conflate all notifications into a single category, probably in an attemp to abuse the system.

For sure there are some apps that abuse the system but most are quite good with it. And I can say that e.g. Doordash and Uber Eats both give you granular control over notifications related to your delivery updates, Uber actually gives you about a dozen categories of alerts.
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