Are unwanted Reddit push notifications a new thing?
I haven’t touched reddit since the APIcalyspe. I’m planning to delete my account but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I was a heavy Apollo user on iOS but never subscribed to it for its push notification service, instead I kept the official reddit app installed and the only thing I used it for were its notifications. I still have both apps installed.
Anyway, I was surprised to see one pop up yesterday, especially since it wasn’t connected to my user activity (a new private message or reply to an old comment of mine or something). The notification was just an ad. More specifically, it was promoting some trending post on the site that had “>12,000 upvotes.” In many many years of having the app installed I’ve never seen that before. Is it new?
Reddit’s had a mildly antagonist relationship with its users for ages, but it feels like they are REALLY intensifying things now. I’m glad I got off the train when I did. And sorry for making yet another post about reddit, I think we’re all getting tired of harping on it here.
I feel like this behavior is only going to intensify as time goes on. There haven't been any consequences for what they've done so far and the inevitable stages of enshittification have been marching along quite predictably. Once reddit is overcome with ads it will be time to collect for the shareholders. Nothing about reddits future is in the user's best interest IMO.
If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product.
This only holds up for "for profit" companies. For example, this website is free and you are not the product.
I'd argue that we are the product on this site too. However the value system here is much healthier. So you're not being packaged up and sold to marketers or worse. Your content and positivity should organically help foster a healthy online community that mutually benefits all that use it.
Yes. I'm sure this was obvious to most everyone. Charities aren't out for blood. In this context, the thread and article are about reddit, a for profit company. So...yeah.
I was just clarifying. There is no need to be so hostile.
Sorry. I was taking out stress on you. It's no excuse but I have a neck dissection surgery in two days and I'm on edge. So again, I'm sorry I replied so harshly. I shouldn't be putting that energy out there.
I'll be less harsh. You are probably right about that.
It's all good! Good luck on the surgery!
Thanks friend. Appreciate the understanding.
I'm not dead! Also I now have an extremely gnarly scar. And some sweet drainage tubes. But those are only for another week.
Yay, that's great! Good luck on the recovery!
Thanks friend. Appreciate it so much. You've been more than gracious with my behavior.
The catch here is that we're often still the product even when paying for a product. Buying Reddit Gold, Youtube Premium, Google One, isn't going to keep platforms from monetizing your sweet sweet user data.
This kind of thing is one reason why I never allow permissions to apps unless they have demonstrated that they actually need it, and I rarely allow push notifications, even in some cases where it might be useful.
One should never forget that the main purpose of most apps is to make money, and they will monetize you however they think they can.
Ugh, I think it was the Dominos App where I wanted to allow notifications so I could know when the pizza is ready to be picked up
Except allowing notifications also meant allowing them to send ads via the system. So now I have to have notifications off because of the spam, even though it would be useful to have them on.
Using your notification system as an advertising system is really fucking annoying.
If you're on Android, the app BuzzKill has been fantastic for this. I used to be plagued by Snapchat's memory notifications that I do not care about, but had no way to disable specifically as far as I could find in Android or Snapchat settings. Just added a new rule, "When I get a notification from Snapchat that contains 'remember this?' then dismiss immediately." Only complaint, at least on my phone there are some phantom cut-off buzzes my phone makes every now and then, I believe it's Snapchat popping up before immediately getting clobbered.
I keep push notifications off even on ridesharing apps. You can check the status on the app, and just step out just a few moments before the ride arrives. It’s a the courteous thing to do anyways.
For food and deliveries, if it sits there for an extra 2 minutes because you weren’t notified it came it’s not going to make a huge impact.
Weirdly it’s better to opt in to text messages than push messages because you generally have to opt-in to those. IIRC there are some new rules about text spam so you’re less likely to be inundated with ads that way.
The Lyft app has been really annoying lately with promotional notifications.
I don’t live in a place where I can use Lyft daily, I only need it when I travel.
I do the opposite, I trust by default.
Yes, your app can get push notification permissions.
BUT they will go away forever for the first unwanted notification.
Periodically add a new notification category and default it to on is unfortunately an increasingly common behavior for apps looking to game some engagement. LinkedIn is probably the worst I've seen in that regard, but I'm not shocked that Reddit is pulling out all the stops at this point given their looming IPO. They need the lines to go up and to the right, so I would expect lots more gamesmanship from here on out.
You can fortunately block all notifications from an app, but that does mean you wouldn't get potentially useful ones either.
Yeah the Uber Eats app is especially egregious. I will (very) occasionally order food through it, and I want notifications on so I can get live updates on the status of my delivery. But if I forget to turn them off afterwards I get so much notification spam, it’s disgusting.
I actually made an iOS shortcut for that particular situation, it runs whenever the app launches. All it does is prompt me to tap, to open the Uber Eats notification pane in the system settings app. Then I can just toggle push notifs on or off. If I could actually do it directly via shortcut that’d be even better but I think this is the closest I can get to that functionality.
The trend now is for apps to incessantly harass you for permissions every single time you open the app. A curse upon the house of the UX designer who came up with the "Yes / Not Right Now" response binary.
I miss 2012 when a user-friendly experience was at least a passing consideration in the app design process. I feel like our UIs these days are mainly KPI-driven, and as those KPIs shift around it leads to mangled messes like the TikTok "inbox".
"To use this flashlight app, please grant full system permissions in the app menu"
I have an Alexa Show, the ones with the display screens. It adds features regularly that default to on.
I just want to see the current weather, but it will randomly show my worthless news updates and other nonsense because whenever it adds a new category it defaults to on.
In addition, I noticed that Reddit has started sending me email digests of trending threads
I did see that a year or so ago. Immediately unsubscribed from email notifications. Last thing i need is more spam.
It's been on the official app for awhile. Even though I was an Apollo user, I did have the official app as well, though I almost never used it. And I'd get those stupid promotional notifications of posts that I wasn't involved in from sometimes subs I'd never even heard of. I turned off all notifications on the official app after that.
And then of course removed the whole app after the API disappeared.
My wife uses the official app and she gets them all the time.
I keep app notifications off, but another of Huff-n-puff-man’s desperate new user engagement tricks is to force community updates on by default. Suddenly you’re getting notifications about random comments. Every move this idiot makes is driving away users at an accelerating pace.