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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do they don’t know how to turn off notifications of do they just don’t care?
Most people (not just teenagers) just don’t care. One of my favourite things to do when I’m visiting my parents is to open their phones and click on the clear all notifications button. Watching all those notifications slide away is so satisfying.
I’m so glad I don’t get more than about 10 notifications a day (outside of work emails anyway).
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…)
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.
I turn off all notification on my devices usually It’s just notification from Element(Matrix).
