A Common Sense Media report finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours. What does that do to their brains?
As an adult, we do too, and it also negatively impacts us. When I left the other social platforms I took the time to uninstall or disable many notifications, I now receive a total of 5 a day on average. It’s good to see these conversations happening though, whether we react and change though only time will tell.
I wonder whether emails, slack/discord notifications, chatrooms for work/study/play, … are the equivalent to social media notifications for adults.
We can try to break it down a little. Work notifications are not very exciting, so it probably doesn’t give us a dopamine hit, however the notifications could be stressful if they are always about work and timelines. Study might be beneficial, it really depends on if it is a reminder or wants us to perform an action. Play varies widely, from a notification that a friend is or wants to play a game, to a developer has posted their weekly digest of what’s been happening, these tend to give us dopamine as well as they can be interesting to learn about what’s happening.
Are people really not turning notifications off? I don’t even have notifications on for messaging apps
It’s not difficult if you’re on newer versions of iOS and Android. It’s easy to customise notifications or turn them off altogether. If you’re less techy, then it’s more difficult.
The problem is the apps assuming they can send you tons of notifications by default. Plus some apps keep adding new notifications types and assume that people are interested in them (for example shopping apps starting to suggest random products or Instagram advertising the creator’s broadcast channels).
It’s good we’re highlighting the mental burden of constant notifications as some people are not aware of it.
The funny thing is this article talks about kids. My Mom is in her 70s and I maintain her phone and she currently uses a pixel 6, so it’s the latest os of course. Whenever I see her, I have to declutter her notifications. They’re constant. Apps and websites have gotten more noisy and aggressive in prompting users to enable notifications or sending constant push crap and I don’t think most people know how to disable them while retaining what they’re actually wanting to get.
Yea I dont get it, just do it a little bit at a time.
Whenever I get a notification that’s annoying (ex. Remember to play this game!!), I’ll long press and turn them off. Sometimes it’s important but not sound/vibration important, so I’ll just turn them silent.
Now the only notifications I get are things that I actually need.
“remember to play this game” directly translates to “uninstall me right now”
I prefer to give them a chance first. As soon as an app abuses that privilege, the permission to show notifications gets instantly revoked.
If it’s a somewhat useful notification, but I don’t need to read it right now, it gets scheduled and I’ll read that in the afternoon if I feel like it. If it’s a serious offense like spamming, then that right is gone forever. The app may also get a negative review as result.
Now that I look at my notification settings, I can easily identify three groups:
- Serious apps that never send me anything, or if they do, it’s actually something I need to know. There are surprisingly many apps like this.
- Semi-serious apps that send notifications a bit too frequently and they aren’t really that important anyway. These get scheduled. If I ignore the notifications for a week, nothing bad will happen.
- Back-stabbing cannibalistic monetary predator apps. They send nothing but trash and land mines, and they do it all the time. Their business model is usually based on manipulation, misdirection, deception and straight up lies. They try to trick you into clicking some stuff and then rely on you forgetting to cancel the subscription later. I don’t have many apps like this, but all of their notifications are forever blocked. If you have a lot of this cancer of the app store type of garbage, I can totally understand why all notifications are blocked for all apps.
This was such a game-changer for me
Turn notifications off
Problem solved.
First thing I do when I install any app is turn off every form of notification. The only notification left on is the one for text messages and that’s only via my watch.
The change to Android where notifications are now a restricted permission by default has been amazing. Just about every notification I get is one I care about because only ~5% of my apps can even do so. Those that send them too frequently quickly become part of the 95%.
IMO Android notifications have been beating iOS’s notifications system for a LONG TIME. Which is funny because I’m pretty sure iOS was first to “modern” notifications
That’s the problem. Literally every app comes with notifications enabled by default. You need to explicitly customise the notifications in the app or via the phone’s settings.
If we had a mode that blocked notifications by default like web browsers do, you’ll inevitably get “you must enable notifications before you can continue to use this app”!
Luckily Android has a notification permission that you can easily deny when starting the app.
Android 13 and later.
I’ve uninstalled apps because I can’t be arsed finding out how to shut them up before.
This is a modern day Pavlovian response. You hear a bell and you get rewarded with content and a small hit of feel good chemicals. Rinse and repeat.
We have a finite amount of attention to spend in a day. The each notification takes away a little bit. Add in tik tok and shorts, what is left for real people and life
I have the whatever the negative version of a pavlovian response is. Text messages and social media notifications always fill me with anxiety.
I mean, I think at that point it just becomes noise that you filter out. Ain’t nobody looking at their phone for 2000 buzzes every day - when everything’s marked important, nothing is important.
It’s called notification/alert/alarm fatigue and results in desensitization, with users often ignoring notifications entirely. This is terrible, as you’re then likely to ignore critical or important messages, tasks, and dates that you actually do care about (the whole reason notifications exist to begin with).
I imagine some people go the opposite way and anxiously work through each and every notification, elevating stress and sapping hours, energy, and productivity from their lives.
A lot more work needs to be done on giving users complete fine-grained control over notifications and level of severity by app; helping them take control, easily report devs for abuse, and adjust prefs ad-hoc from the notification view to aggressively silence everything that’s exploiting the privilege.
giving users complete fine-grained control over notifications and level of severity by app
Android does exactly this, I can go into any app and it’ll give me a breakdown of all the types of notification it sends. So like Instagram will have DMs, friends posts, “What’s new” etc. As separate notification types and I can go into each and determine if it’s super critical and should override even DnD all the way down to completely disabled. It even tells you the average notifications you get for each type.
It’s not perfect, it depends on the app dev for proper breakout of the types. I’ve seen some apps that dumps all notifications into the same channel, but all the major ones are pretty good about it.
I think it’s important for people to learn how to manage/customize notifications whether it be on the OS level or through each app individually.
I keep a lot of things as silent notifications, so they pop up but don’t grab my attention. They’ll be there when I look at my phone. I think texts/calls are the only thing that makes noise on my phone at all.
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I’m so glad I don’t get more than about 10 notifications a day (outside of work emails anyway).
Same. I find that even that many is a significant distraction.
All of my notifications are from friends and family talking to me about stuff, so it’s not a terrible thing. I have zero notifications from Lemmy or emails or anything.
Thanks to the damn notifications now I HATE modern phones, I have uninstalled nearly every app from my phone, deleted mail accounts and set some tools to make my phone a normal phone again, nowdays smartphones are just a source of annoying ads. I installed an app (I think the name is minimalist phone) and it has a function to create a “box” for low priority notifications.
Android gives you very good control over notifications, from turning them off completely, to blocking certain ones at certain times.
Notifications are hardly a problem for me anymore.
And if you do get a stray unwelcome notification, just long press it and disable that type of notification from that app right there.
Only kids and teens? Pretty much everyone around here has their head down starting at one.
(He says while scrolling through Lemmy on his phone…)
I spend a lot of downtime scrolling through Lemmy and reddit, but I still only get a few notifications a day
I turn off all notification on my devices usually It’s just notification from Element(Matrix).
What the hell are kids doing to get 200+ notifications a day?
People install multiple apps daily, like they dont care about notifications, especially old people, they get so many notifications.
Social media apps 24/7
You didn’t??
Nope.
Source: I’m an old
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I’m introverted. I always keep myself in offline mode unless I explicitly want to be talked to. If I’m having a conversation or being available, it’s on my own terms. The constant flood of notifications when I’m doing something is aggravating and tiring, as is the expectation that I immediately respond or else I’m a jerk for ignoring people.
destroy what annoys you on sight
oh yeah, I’ve been fighting hard to keep only important shit in my notifications for years decades
edit: shit does Lemmy not use markdown?
I think Lemmy accepts markdown formatting, the syntax might just be different
For example,
this is a strikethroughhuh, whatever that is, doesn’t federate to kbin
5000/day fake news, that’s like one every ten seconds of every waking hour
I used to have Snapchat and Instagram downloaded on my phone and the amount of pointless notifications I got from those was staggering. I can only imagine what it would be like if you have more social media on top of that. Same with Uber eats, they CONSTANTLY send notifications. I got so sick of checking my phone so often that I turned off all notifications, then deleted apps, then put my phone on 24 hour do not disturb + grayscale everything. It’s kinda hard to break the constant phone check cycle, but it’s changing!
