Notifications are ads
This is a thought I've been having a lot lately. It seems like 90% of notifications I get these days both on my phone and computer are ads begging me to either: upgrade a service I already have ("you're running out of space on [insert cloud service here] at 75% usage will you please UPGRADE?") or re-engage with an app that hasn't sucked enough of my attention ("we MISS you! PLEASE engage!"), with the remaining tiny minority being useful actionable information. I've noticed too that social media notifications NEVER give you enough detail about something that's going on to not have to open the app directly. It's kind of exhausting to the point where I've disabled most notifications on my devices altogether. I don't really know the point of this post other than to commiserate and to simply open it up for discussion. Thoughts?
EDIT: WOW this blew up! Thanks everyone for your contributions!
Yup, ever since android gave explicit permissions per app and per kind of notification more and more apps have been pushing notifications in the same group/class as the kind of notification I want, so I throw them all into silent notifications but now I feel like I need an AI which can pre-read/filter spam notifications 😩
Same for text messages. It should be extremely easy to filter out political ad messages.
I've been really really happy with my Pixel when it comes to that. I haven't had a single political text actually display on my phone in years.
It's unreal how well the Pixel call screening works. Even if it lets a call through it warns you it could be spam. I've had zero actual spam calls in the years call screening was introduced.
I don't know what black magic Google is using to do this, and it's one of those let sleeping dogs lie things.
I was using an app called Yet Another Call Blocker, which is on fdroid. I got a system warning about a week ago that it was a dangerous app, and google recommended uninstalling it.
Naturally I told google to fuck off and carried on with my day.. I assume it's only a matter of time before it's removed forcibly though.
Pixel phones do this, as well as screen calls. I get about a dozen calls a week and several spam texts a day. I cannot imagine having a different phone. Honestly it's probably time to just change my number but nearly 20 years of having the same number makes me resistant 😔
With all the data sharing, I doubt a new number would mean less spam. It might even mean more spam. So glad I'm able to ignore unknown callers. I can't imagine being in sales or something and needing to answer every call.
Thankfully AT&T started blocking spam calls. I still get some random calls now and then but when I do pick them up, which is rare, it's usually a butt dial or someone trying to reach my father, etc.
yeah the Pixel's call screening and text spam filtering features are great -- unfortunately they don't have anything unique to filter out these meaningless notifications yet...
Hold on, you get what?, is that a US thing?
Basically if you ever donate to a campaign they'll spam you, almost every day, with some kind of plea for more money. Always a different person. Every single democrat across this nation is in my inbox.
I haven't given the RNC a red cent since Ron Paul's first moneybomb in '08 and I still have the rest of them in my inbox right now. They don't go for unsubscribing you from mailing lists, the unsubscribe action just moves you to a different one instead... several new ones actually. The good news is that since their messages are all filled with the same predictable dog whistles they are trivially easy to catch with a filter. :P
I also have a good chunk of the DNC messaging me because I gave Yang twenty bucks during his run. Both sides are truly relentless. Outside of election season it's a one email a month sort of thing, but during election season, the spammers are all renting both parties their server infrastructure, and it's all burning more energy than bitcoin.
I never donated any money to anyone but I get so many trumpo texts and surveys it's downright infuriating
Political messages during election season are considered a special class of communication and are given more leniency. Spammers would go to jail or at least get fined for this sort of thing, but not political parties. It's perfectly okay here for political parties to make phone calls and send text messages that would be classed as spam. It's a very old exception to the usual rules, as I recall it had something to do with protecting the integrity of the political process. Facilitation of polling, coordination of political party activity, that sort of reasoning. Made a lot more sense when telephones were a new invention, but it's still around today.
I recently switched my primary phone to an iPhone and I dearly miss how Android deals with notifications and spam in general. I think I'm just way too used to how Android handles this stuff. Spam messages would automatically be filtered out and not even shown in my messages list. You can then further filter your message list to show only personal or work contacts/texts. Spam calls, if from a known spam caller, would simply not ring and just show up in my call history saying "Spam". If a caller is likely a spam caller, but not 100% known to be one, the UI would be tinted red with text saying "Potential Spam Caller". The iPhone technically lets you filter spam texts and calls but they never seem to truly get hidden like they do on my Android phones.
When my identity was stolen last year I signed up for Experian. Now every other day it's popups asking for upgrades.
Same with bumble.
I feel like there’s another corollary here: emails are just notifications.
My personal inbox is nothing but receipts of purchases, shipping notifications, and newsletter ads for things I haven’t yet unsubscribed from.
I disabled personal email notifications on my phone and my life is so much better for it.
I disable notifications for absolutely everything that works without them (things like KDE connect work better with), excepting Slack during work hours.
I'll check my stuff on my terms, thanks. I don't need a distraction to pay more attention to my phone every 30 seconds.
I never set up email on my phone in the first place. Email is for stuff which can wait.
I've never set up email on my phone either. I have specific times for checking it and responding, and I'll be doing that on my laptop. Otherwise I won't be concerned with it.
Since I do get important emails I have a filter for most notification emails to be become "read" so they don't pop up in notifications. I need to review the filters every now and then but it works fine.
Not really an issue for me. Apps don't get permission to send notifications unless I explicitly allow them, which I generally don't. The only notifications are get are useful ones that I want.
You're absolutely correct. It's why I have notifications disabled on my phone except for a very few applications (text, email, authenticator, local library).
I often handle others' phones as part of my job and I am horrified when I see constant pings from random applications popping up constantly. It feels like the internet right around the time that every site figured out how pop-up ads work, except these at least have the decency to stay in one spot and not run away from the mouse.
I feel similarly about emails I get to rate some service I used.
"DON'T FORGET TO RATE US! HOW ARE WE DOING? FILL OUT A SHORT SURVEY TO WIN A CHANCE AT A $10 GIFT CARD".
Leave me alone, all of yous. When they beg for feedback, it seems like it's just to remind you that they exist (advertisement), or they are trying to enlist you as a free volunteer to do a job they should be doing.
Yeah basically. You miss nothing by turning them off. They only serve to get you to use their app when you otherwise wouldn't. Turn them all off. Use the app when you want to use it, not when you're prompted to by the app.
If there's something you absolutely must respond to immediately, like you're tied to your work chat, sure, leave that on. Seek ways to mute it when you're not obligated to make immediate responses. But think real hard about whether or not you actually need to be tied to your email. Don't you check it often enough on your own? If you don't respond before the next time you purposefully check your email, is anyone going to complain?
I know this sounds idealistic, but I've found that a lot of my own obligations were self-imposed. No one expected me to constantly watch my phone for notifications so I can instantly respond. No one would notice if I held off on responding to an email for the next time I felt like responding to emails. Neither of these things were furthering my career either. I still find myself flipping over to my work email off-hours for no particular reason, and it's a bad habit that I'm trying to break, but I've unloaded a healthy amount of mental baggage just by letting that stuff wait until I need to look at it.
I'm already walking around with a phone attached to me all the time. If something's really serious, they can call me and talk to me like a human being.
Another way to look at it is that notifications are the new email, for people who don't do email. Also, text messages are the new calendar reminder, sent by businesses that (understandably) don't trust people to remember an appointment on their own.
More abstractly, the way I'm thinking about it is that inboxes are useful, but managing them is kind of a pain. We don't want too many of them, because what if you forget to check them? But we also don't want to have notifications all go to one place, because it's too noisy. We're also conflicted on when we should be notified.
Tildes has its own notifications and I like that, since I'm obsessed and visit the site often. I like that I never get a Tildes notification when I don't visit. It can't possibly interrupt me. Nothing that happens here is important enough to do that.
I do the same for Facebook, but I forget about it for days or weeks at a time, so I have sometimes missed messages that I wish I'd read earlier. Not badly enough to set up notifications, though.
Come to think of it, I probably have dozens of inboxes from all the forums and other websites that I've occasionally visited. An RSS reader acts as a collection of inboxes. Google is another collection of inboxes (Gmail, Chat, Photos, YouTube). GitHub has its own notifications. And so on. It's a mess.
I forgot where exactly I saw it, but I read a post a long time ago about de-cluttering your phone where one of the tips was that any notification you receive should be from an actual human being.
It applies to more than just phones of course, that article just happened to be about them, but I use it for almost everything in my life that involves notifications, so my cell phone, computer, email, work computer, etc. If the notification didn't come from an actual human being, myself included, then I don't care about it. That one tip has really helped me de-clutter my electronic devices and actually pay attention to my notifications more instead of just "oh great another 30+ notifications, let me just hide them all" because I know that every single one of them came from an actual person.
So things like texts are okay, emails from actual people I care about (you can set filters to automatically sort them into a folder that you prioritize looking at), reminders that I set for myself, someone ringing my doorbell, a purchase made on one of my credit cards.... etc. All these notifications are things that a real human being caused and may require my attention. Everything else can wait until I bother to check it.
Any of the free Antivirus software (Avira, AVG, Comodo, etc) is nothing but a means to sell you their software. For the longest time it would force-install their browser, popup saying your information is visible, time to upgrade and use other scare tactics to trick you into upgrading.
Huge reason to switch to FOSS where possible. Apps that aren't trying to sell you anything are way better about notifications.
Absolutely. I've started moving that direction.
I love how much control I have over notifications. My phone is always in do not disturb mode, and I've allowed only a couple things to get around that. I'm also pretty strict about what I allow to appear, period. I haven't noticed that more apps want to notify me of things (or any notifications like you mention), but then again, I don't use my phone heavily.
Constant do not disturb has been a godsend. I started doing it because of a random issue I had with my phone (it was switching between wi-fi calling and cell calling and notifying me of that every time, which was pretty much any time I moved my phone), but I won't go back. If someone needs to get in touch with me immediately, they can call me. Otherwise, I'll notice when I notice.
And if someone keeps calling me about unimportant things that could easily be a text or an email, I'm going to set their ring to silent.
There ya go! I'd probably have the same attitude as you in a work setting, but for my job, I just do the work and get left alone. My take is just for friends/family/people I like, so maybe that explains our difference. I have a totally different view of messages vs. calls. I frequently find that messages drag a conversation on way too long, whereas a quick call with some immediate back-and-forth straightens everything out in a few minutes.
Hence the "I'll get to it when I see it" for texts. If something is truly time sensitive enough to warrant a call, especially if a text has already been sent and is unanswered, then it is important
I turned on notifications for Instagram because a collaborator is using it to message me about work and I thought I might just let her if she finds it convenient. But now they're sending notifications that I have to open the app to check out, and when I do, it's spam marketing to start using their version of Twitter. All this is going to do is have me turn off all notifications again. I'm not about to let myself be interrupted any time some marketing team somewhere says so.
This is not directly related to notifications, but somewhat adjacent. I keep my phone on silent and have disabled vibration. I'm reachable (I still check it too frequently), but my phone no longer interrupts me unless I choose to let it interrupt me. If someone texts, it doesn't need an immediate response. I'll respond eventually. If someone phones (99% of the time it will be my mother or a spam call), they can leave a message and I'll get back to them. It's never urgent, and even when my mother phones instead of emailing, it's because it's easier to discuss something rather than go back and forth over email. Hell, she sent me an email when my dad had a heart attack (he's fine now). If that's not urgent, I don't know what is.
I understand not everyone is able to do this - you might need to be immediately reachable for work or family purposes. But for those who can, it might be worth giving this a try.
I've been doing this for years, as well as having most notifications off, and I totally recommend it. I tell everyone my phone is on silent and that I'll get back to them when I can. If urgent, most people who call will send a text saying what it's about. I will see a notification on my lock screen and can then get back to them sooner than I would otherwise.
If the caller is not someone I know, I usually don't even return the call because I've been getting too many scam calls. Anyone with something important to say will send an email. Everyone else was just trying to sell something or pull a scam.
This system has been a life saver!
It depends on your apps. I try to use FOSS apps as much as possible, and heavily curate all installed apps. I go so far as to freeze/disable all "required" apps that try to push nonsense notifications, and reenable them ondemand.
I hate notifications coming up on my phone so very few apps get that permission usually just chat apps I need to see or banking etc.
As for notifications on PC I use linux so I seldom get them for something I'm not initiating but I have them muted anyway so the queitly pile up and I clear them when needed. But I did have to fix an issue in my mums laptop last week and my god windows sure loves to give you notifications about all sorts of utter rubbish and reminds me why I switched.
I thought notifications on my desktop OS would be a good thing, but it's honestly obnoxious like you describe (at least on Windows) so I often find myself in Focus/DND modes 90% of the time. Linux is looking better every year.
I have a simple system for android, that if I get ads in the notification, that type of notification gets disabled, and I work around it. It's sometimes annoying, but never for very long.
Where it gets tricky is some notifications are ads, but are also offering value - like free food or money off food orders I would probably like anyway. These I'll allow, but I'm not always happy about it