One very notable difference between Facebook circa 2010 and Facebook circa 2020 is notifications circa 2010 had a very good signal to noise ratio. Basically 100% of notifications were ones I wanted to see.
That also meant on many days I'd have no notifications at all. A week could go by with 0 notifications. Since the quality of notifications used to be so high, I used to treat FB notifications the same as I treat my email inbox (no email goes unseen).
Over time, they started jamming in "fake" notifications like "Your friend posted a new video!" whereas in the past, I'd simply have 0 notifications for the day. After that, it became impractical to keep up with the never ending notifications.
They need to be looking at the quality of their notifications rather than their frequency.
IMO they really messed up by tracking and using time spent on page per day (or something like this) as a metric. That’s something that makes sense if you’re building a side-app, or an app focused on addictive content like tik tok. But if you’re trying to build a useful tool for people then you’re going to move away further and further from that vision. Which is what happened imo: the useful tool was transformed into a content-consuming app due to tracking the wrong metrics.
The best thing that any PM with enough clout at fb could do right now is force the org to track a different metric, and move the content consuming side to a different app (because there’s still a lot of growth value in communities, watch, etc.)
That stays the most fitting metric for facebook though: the bulk of their revenue comes from advertising, and anything related to ads needs your presence: they need data to target you and increase ad price, and they need your eyeballs to be there to watch those highly priced ads. There's just no way around it.
Meta might come up with different revenue streams and different strategies, but for the blue app that ship has sailed.
Yeah this quote doesn't really work if the metric is your actual goal. If I make daily revenue for my e-commerce company (or daily ad engagement for Meta) my goal, it does not cease to be useful.
By making the metric the goal, it could be that the underlying assumptions change. Maybe previously all time spent on Facebook was "positive" time where the user feels engaged and is interested in ads. After adding dumb notifications. The time spent might become partially "positive" and partially "negative", where the user feels abused and might hate the ads. Is the metric still the goal then?
> IMO they really messed up by tracking and using time spent on page per day (or something like this) as a metric
FWIW, in my time at FB from 2019-2021, we were explicitly disallowed from using time on app as a success metric for the products my team worked on. Instead, we focused on the utility of the experience as the goal, i.e. people finding the product useful was more important than simply using it.
I wasn't working on the newsfeed though, so I'm not sure if that applied to that part of the app.
Like adsClicked / serverResourcesConsumed? Interesting how that would stand up for users that e.g. post text vs users that post video, and the fallout of their followers.
This is just a result of the business model based on selling the ads, where the time on site correlates to a number of ads seen corellates to money earned. Everything else you describe necessarily follows.
This is one of the reasons I stopped using Facebook completely. Every notification was fake and meant to increase engagement. All it did was push me away. When it was more like notifying a mention, it was useful. I stopped using it for several years now and never see myself going back.
On another note, I stopped using Twitter recently for obvious reasons. I check it occasionally to see if there's anyone new that moved to Mastodon. And I noticed an increase in fake notifications there. Another reason to never go back there either.
I started using Twitter again and in order to kill fake notifications, you have to go to "Push Notifications" settings and uncheck everything except for "Related to you and your Tweets" section.
Twitter seems to respect those settings, while Facebook still finds an excuse to push fake notifications even with tweaked settings. I basically disabled notifications entirely via OS for FB.
I think reddit is even worse. A fake facebook notification is at least still a notification.
But official reddit app and website in other hand, generate notification badge WITHOUT NOTIFICATION. What did you even expect me to do about that? It's just dumb-ass.
In the end, I just wrote a userscript to remove notification badge of reddit web page, given how useless and distractive it is.
Oh my issue with reddit.com is similar but different: I'll get a notification badge, tap it, see "Messages (1)", tap that, and then get "there doesn't seem to be anything here" under the Unread tab.
Once I switch to "Inbox" I can see the new message. Of course, if it's a long thread I have to find the bottom of it first.
I have a high confident that the badge is fake because I already used ublock to ban[1] the update socket of reddit webpage, there is no way I can actually get a notification without reload the page.
I’ve never seen this with old reddit nor 3rd party clients (which beyond possibly costing a nominal fee, I don’t know why you wouldn’t use sans some minor features like polls).
I do use 3rd reddit client on phone.(the fake badge is literally the reason I installed it) But I still use the new reddit page on browser because reddit I visit commonly are mostly media-rich. Which is the old reddit not useful for.
I think Facebook in 2010 just had a very good SNR because they didn't add algorithm generated crap to the feed which was basic and chronological.
Later they came with their timeline which omitted stuff I wanted to see (updates from my friends) and added stupid posts from randos. That's really what forced me off the platform. It broke the whole point of it.
Unfortunately Instagram is doing the same now with their TikTok style "suggested posts".
In 2010 things were going on in Facebook that I wanted to be notified about. Now, at best, there’s one post a month I might find actually interesting. For years Facebook promoted trash, divisive people, and ads. I got bored with getting sucked into debates with extremist acquaintances on both sides and removed them from view, everybody else did the same or settled down in life and had less to post about. Every once in a while somebody will post something I want to see, but it’s gone from once an hour to once a month and really the only reason I still have an account is to keep very distant connections alive.
It would be nice if meta went back to the original inspiration of a “face book” and made a product that was just a photo or two and links to social links and contact information.
I never played FarmVille, but some friends did, and FarmVille sent notifications to your friends as well. Only a handful of friends playing FarmVille meant 1-2 daily notifications from that game.
Notifications were effectively unusable at that point, until Facebook separated game notifications from other notifications.
After that, it never really got any better, for me at least. Notifications tended to be less relevant than before and I disabled them on all devices.
This is what caused me to delete the app in favor of Instagram and fb messenger. Not sure if they changed notifications or if I simply never enabled them, but my fresh install of the fb app is less annoying
The notifications used to just be stuff directly applicable to you (X tagged you in a photo etc).
Then the demographic that advertisers really care about — affluent Americans in the 25-49 age bracket — stopped using Facebook.com every waking minute, and product managers panicked.
Their solution was to add more content to one of the most-clicked areas of the UI (I bet at least one product manager got a nice stock bump based on that change).
Short-term gains are great and all, but the change smelled of desperation, and had utterly predictable long-term effects.
And now we get a blog post telling us what should have been obvious to begin with.
I agree except that I don’t think it was desperation that triggered this. They optimize for the wrong metric, and started seeing huge growth number and thought this was great. What happened is that they used the huge user base they had built to convert their app into an addictive tiktok-like app. Of course it was going to work in terms of growth. But it’s a different app. They should have spinned that off as a different app. Not as the biggest part of the social networking tool that was super useful to people.
It’s really a shame because I don’t think we’ll see many opportunities in history for an app that everyone has and that can be used to connect people.
For years there has been a big red notification dot stuck on the FB video tab reminding me that I have some large number of shitty videos to watch. I have no idea how FB decides precisely how many shitty videos it is very important that I watch. It used to be in the 40s, now it's 15. I never clicked the tab once.
I actually tried to figure out how to get rid of this at some point, but it definitely wasn't a priority for FB to give me control over this.
I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.
> I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.
Yeah. They're an advertising company. They make money by spamming users with noise. Contempt for other human beings is in their DNA.
They don't want you to disable the red dot. They want it there 24 hours a day bothering you until you give in and watch those ads disguised as videos just to get rid of it and find some peace. They'll actually run human experiments on their users without their informed consent just to find out the exact level of annoyance they'll tolerate without deleting their accounts in disgust.
If you try to disable the red dot, they'll ban you. It's against their terms of service to not be bothered by notifications. You need to submit to this abuse if you want or need to use their services.
You can still try anyway. Make a plugin to delete the dot. Then a few days later you'll find they scrambled the page structure on purpose just so you could no longer interface with it, precisely so you could not defeat their little nagging dot.
"Contempt" doesn't quite do it justice. They delight in our suffering and profit off it.
I would really enjoy a well-researched essay substantiating these points. I've heard bits and pieces consistent with this but when you put it so strongly it boggles the mind a bit. But it's also believable because it makes some sense of why social media is so hellish.
> I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.
Even better was when messenger split off from fb proper into its own app, but still showed a notification bubble with red exclamation marks (or some such, it's been a while) that you couldn't dismiss. clicking opened the page to install the messenger app.
Fun fact: the internal (bullshit) justification was that the Messenger install upsell counted as a message, and that's what the fake notification was for even though the same message wouldn't appear in the inbox on web.
I uninstalled the other day when I started getting notifications when someone’s story is on my feed. On messenger. That’s not a message and there is no way I found in twenty minutes of digging to turn it off. Screw that.
Agreed, this is incredibly user-hostile. As a pro-tip, you can get past it on web by telling your device to request the desktop website. They have a responsive design, so it’s actually quite usable. Just emphasizes how slimy the push to the app is, though.
A broken feature on the mobile version nudges towards app installation, a broken feature on the desktop version does not.
This means that there is some benefit for Facebook to not fix the mobile version.
If a bug persists and benefits the company, we should - by principle - never assume it to be a bug.
We see the same right now with reddit, where old interfaces slowly (and clearly intentionally) crumble away, permanently signalling to the user that it is time to switch to one of the interfaces with a higher ad density.
Love the tip! For me (iOS/Chrome), this seems to briefly display the newest message but then it tries to load all prior messages with that person. Am I doing something wrong? At least I can now see who sent the message!
Huh, strange. On iOS/Safari, tapping the messenger icon then requesting the desktop site takes me to my messages inbox. Surprising that it varies between browsers.
It does that for me, but then doesn’t display the latest message, or present a way to respond. Perhaps it’s because I’m on a 13 mini, which has less screen real estate? I tried rotating to landscape but that didn’t help.
This and the newsfeed not being chronological, or the option to have it chronological being hidden from the user (that’s one of the most recurring question and feature request that internal employees ask, how crazy is that). IMO facebook could really change by creating a subscription and ensuring that people who subscribe are happy enough with the product to keep paying. I think that recenters the incentives towards building something for the user.
Another meta problem is that there seem to be no authoritative product person that can force his/her vision on the product so you get hundreds of visions colliding and fighting for changes. IMO it’s much more valuable to have a coherent vision being enforced for the product, otherwise you get this frankenstein-like collection of apps.
Finally, the fact that HN is such a hater of facebook means that most fb engineers have deserted HN and they’re not reading the excellent ideas and feedback that this community sometimes provide. It’s a shame, because I still completely believe in Facebook as a good product for the world.
> I still completely believe in Facebook as a good product for the world.
Well, people believe the craziest things so you are in good company.
But on the important point on whether facebook is salvageable with a user subscription model: extremely dubious. In some sense adtech has ruined the concept of users paying for a good product and there is poetic justice in that. The magic wand that turns users into product wont turn product into client.
What might work is "social as public or semi-public infrastructure", namely getting cities, companies, states or even countries paying for user accounts of residents, employees etc. as a sort of benefit.
But even in the unlikely scenario facebook would relinquish its residual adtech earnings in favor of a new and less lucrative business model it would likely face stiff competition from newcomers with less historical baggage
> Well, people believe the craziest things so you are in good company.
I assume people who say that haven’t had a good experience with fb, but it changed my life when I was younger. I still use to track all my friends across the world.
> In some sense adtech has ruined the concept of users paying for a good product and there is poetic justice in that
There is less than a snowball's chance in hell of me paying Meta for the privilege of using a less fucked version of their product. I just actively avoid using it instead and I would wager that my life is better off for it.
So Twitter has at least the power to charge users, whereas Facebook is inherently so bad that willing users wouldn’t even let Facebook have their CC details…
Which is understandable, because FB optimizes for clickability and shows very few posts of those who rarely post (and whose posts really deserve attention imo) so after seeing no reaction from their friends ("are they ignoring me?" - no, FB just decided not to include your post in their feeds) they just gave up.
consider that the goal of facebook is not to build a 'good product for the world'. facebook exists to 1) keep your attention 2) extract as much data as it can 3) make inferences where necessary/possible 4) sell targeted ads.
facebook is an ad business. to that end, they do try to improve the user experience wherever necessary to advance the goals stated above, but that's it.
On subscriptions…They tried some paying mechanism already, and I think Linkedin ate their lunch before they had a chance to try other low hanging fruits.
Subscriptions work when either the user makes money from pushing the content, or actively wants the content they’re provided. On the former, boosted spam has already been implemented, ultra targeted ads are another form of this, and stalking users to push private messages to them is already Linkedin’s bread and butter.
On the latter, the issue is of course that the “content” (people’s post) isn’t and won’t be worth paying for in general. I won’t be paying to read my relatives bickering about stupid issues. Random people’s funny takes and viral jokes will be spread on other networks so paying for it won’t make sense either. I’ll subscribe to my favorite novel, manga or tv show, or check a well put newsletter or podcast. None of that has a place on the blue app.
Facebook at this point has a very specific niche, and trying to get out of that niche either puts it in competition with better/less toxic/griftier services, or canibalizes other meta products. In that sense pushing facebook in a completely new direction is a tall order. If a PM had a crazy novel idea, they’d better execute it in Instagram or a completely new product than have it get beaten to death in facebook.
> haters
I was following a bunch of very talented and idea prolific designers and engineers working at facebook. IMO they haven’t left HN or Twitter or the public place. They left facebook instead.
The assumption is that chronological feed makes for less engagement, and if your business model is to sell eyeballs, that creates an intensive to hide it and make your KPIs better.
I have disabled all forms of video notifications on Facebook, but over the last few weeks I have been getting video notifications for pages I follow sporadically throughout the day. It felt very much like periodic attempts to get me back into the app, despite my direct indication that I do not want those types of notifications.
I reported the spurious notifications, then eventually gave up and disabled notifications for the entire app at the OS level.
> I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.
You can always return the contempt by extracting all our data out (provided that's important to you) and permanently shutting down you account. I believe that's the most efficient thing you can do to tell FB to go to hell.
Edit: I honestly believe that any FB user this is the most harmful thing you can do to them.
I'm hostage to Meta, my grandmother uses only Messenger to call and would/can not learn any other interface. The rest of the family only chat through Whatsapp.
Quitting Meta means not getting to be in those circles anymore.
Yes, many people suffer from this problem as well. I guess I can say what I said because I cancelled my account many many years ago (if not mistaken more than a decade ago).
Don’t count on that encryption. It’s a great marketing point that has no real way to verify or audit. And even assuming Whatsapp's end-to-end encryption works as advertised: that doesn’t mean that the app is free from backdoors.
Message contents also aren't the only kind of data that Whatapp knows about. Facebook doesn't need message contents to monetize your communications. They almost certainly harvest Whatapp's metadata and tie it to everything else they know about you.
If you like the service, that's great. Use it and enjoy. But don't assume that your communications are secure.
Whether I like it or not, I have to use it because it's what everyone here uses. There is no point in having a perfect fully audited free software messenger if nobody uses it. I'm just glad that everyone is using something this secure by default. At this point I'm just counting my blessings.
WhatsApp encryption is strong enough to defeat criminal investigations in my country. That has to count for something. They got so angry about it they blocked WhatsApp services for days and jailed Facebook people.
I have actually tried extracting my data from google and facebook, and neither methods worked. I tried multiple times, and the process breaks inevitably at some point.
Meta refuses to give me access to- or delete my Instagram account.
A few years back I changed the e-mail to a fake e-mail. I accidentally typo’d my mobile phone number due to which it now resolves with a Philippines prefix. This prevents me from verifying their ‘looks like you’re trying to do a suspicious log-in’
They won’t give access or delete my account despite:
- me knowing the current password
- providing old passwords
- indicating to them the old e-mail address to my account
- verifying that I have access to that e-mail account
- verifying that I own the ‘old’ phone number to the account with a phone bill (!)
- indicating I am willing to provide a scanned ID
- indicating two friend on my ‘following’ list that would be willing to verify its me trying to access the account
At this point I have pretty much done 5-factor authentication and they still won’t accede.
Thankfully I am an EU citizen and the data commissions are currently extremely trigger happy with GDPR fines, so my hope is this forced them to resolve it, or make it cost them tens to hundreds of millions for not doing so.
Fuck you and your scummy illegal practices, Meta :)
> the data commissions are currently extremely trigger happy with GDPR fines, so my hope is this forced them to resolve it, or make it cost them tens to hundreds of millions for not doing so.
There have been numerous cases of fb purity users having their Facebook accounts banned. Use at your own risk as Facebook is quite clear about extensions that alter the experience being against TOS.
This is false information. No FB Purity users have been banned because of using FBP, they may have been banned for doing other things, but I have had no reports of users being banned for using FBP. There is no documentatry evidence for your claims, and you should not go round telling people fake news like that.
For a user's satisfactory, I really think any notification should be opt-in instead of opt-out for anything other than direct message.
Facebook's blue app is one of the first apps I had to turned off the notification entirely. If I really care about some one who just upload a photo I will go into your app to take a look. These notifications are now just baits for the ads.
Ensure that we don't get pointless notifications that exist only to increase engagement and have these on by default. Take advantage of feelings of fomo. You ever actually go turn off notifications? They have obscure names and there's tons of them in some apps. I don't want to waste time and energy fighting back apps constantly. Healthy defaults to start with
Eh. If the EU can make a law requiring every website to make me click through a popup regarding the types of strings my browser will put in the `Cookie` header, I think the US can make a law requiring every app to let me choose what types of notifications it sends me.
For example, I have notifications enabled for Amazon because I need to know when a delivery is coming but they’ll use that channel to spam me about “deals”. There’s no reasonable way to disable all these ad-via-notifications.
Are you sure? I just checked my device, and while all notifications are toggled under a catch-all "notifications" category, I am able to customize this from within the app, and shipment notifications are their own category.
“Reasonable” is doing some heavy lifting, but i just spent another 10 minutes hunting through all the in-app settings menus I could find and I haven’t found a way to disable these alerts.
They certainly don’t want you to disable deal notifications and make it very difficult to do so.
It’s like the old quote about fire extinguishers: if you don’t know where one is, it doesn’t exist. If a reasonable effort cannot find the setting, it doesn’t exist.
Hm, I'm sorry to hear you wasted your time. There was a shortcut directly to the in-app notification settings directly from the android app notification settings.
Our datacenter's network maintenance notifications were opt-in. Guess who called in because a BGP session was down and didn't know, this user. They switched all new account owners to opt-out for future notifications.
I haven't been at facebook in a while, but seeing that chart at the top which shows the goal metric increase and become statistically significantly higher still makes me subconsciously very happy.
One thing a lot of people outside the company probably don't realize is that every team at Facebook is different and the culture of experimentation varies greatly from team to team. When I was there, the people who worked on stories ranking were very serious about user satisfaction and thought deeply about whether changes were good for the user even beyond what could be measured via metrics. I worked a tiny bit on notifications experiments at Instagram (wasn't on a team but monitored and changed some ongoing experiments to improve metrics). At the time, I believe the notifications team was less thoughtful about this. I think this has changed in the years since I left though, based on this blog post and what I've seen in the app.
I'm glad to see more and more of these types of results. The typical pattern for the past few years at many consumer internet companies is an A/B test, with some positive short-term metrics and no long-term validation. Any qualitative resistance to the short-term engagement metrics is dismissed, and the change is rolled put. Product managers and software engineering teams parade these metrics wins, get promoted, etc. User experience degrades one a/b test at a time, while "engagement" improves.
Glad to see someone is thinking about qualitative user experience and correlating it with long-term metrics.
Source: ran an engineering group at a "data driven" consumer internet company that fell victim to these tactics.
More notifications increased satisfaction by a small amount as well - when dissatisfied users like me deleted our accounts because of them. Technically, overall satisfaction increased by removing us from the survey population.
Yeah, I gigve very few apps notification rights, and zero websites in my browsers. I truly do not see why browser notifications were ever allowed, they're 99% abuse.
The feed used to be a simple chronological timeline. Then it evolved into whatever stochastic mess it is now in an attempt to maximize user engagement and ad views. So they've turned the notifications into essentially a mini version of the old news feed which (big surprise) is damn noisy.
If at any point your setup was configured so that emails sent at odd hours bothered you, that’s on you. Email was always meant to be asynchronous. The sender should never have to wonder if it’s a good time for you.
Why do you have your phone configured in a way which notifications can wake you at night? The only time I see notifications between 2100-0700 is if I actively look at my phone.
If I'm out at night I want to see if my friends text me. Fixed hours for silent notification are stupid and only work for people that don't have a social life.
In the early days of Android there was an app which was able to set my phone to silent based on nearly unlimited inputs, like location, time, app notification, weather, etc. The relevant API was patched out with Android 5 or so, one of the most stupid decisions ever.
On Android 12, at least, the current version of Google Play groups "Payments, deals and recommendations" into one notification category. Want to avoid deals and recommendations? Won't get notified when you're charged money.
It's more challenging to disable notifications we don't care about anymore with tactics like these.
They'd increase usage by me if they let me tailor what I want to see. I NEVER want to see "so-and-so commented on ~~~". I never want to see "so-and-so liked ~~~". I never want to see "short" videos. But, FB doesn't let me turn them off so I get disgusted at how they are trying to shovel content at me and I stop looking.
Same with Twitter (though I found tweetdeck solves much of this).
Same with Instagram, trying to shovel content I didn't ask for in my face.
Same with Youtube's dark pattern of trying to get you watch "Shorts" and if you close the row it says "Okay, I won't show you again for 30 days". "NO! FUCK YOU! I didn't ask you to show me again in 30 days!!" (and BTW I'm paying)
Twitter does has that dark pattern as well. Delete something and it says "ok, we'll show you less of this" .. "NO! FUCK YOU. Don't show me any ever!"
The result is that I barely use any of these services. Once a month or so I try again for some reason, boredom? and get pissed off and leave.
Now some FB/Twitter/Youtube person will claim their metrics say that their dark patterns get people to use the service more. Ugh!
> I NEVER want to see "so-and-so commented on ~~~"
This was the nail in the coffin for me. I just want to see what my friends post in the order they post it. But Facebook mangled the feed so bad they drove me away as a user. They’re doing the same thing to Instagram. While it doesn’t show your friends acitivty, it also barely shows anything they post. One post from a friend. One suggested post. One ad. One suggested post. Another ad. Then another post from a friend. Then when you’re “all caught up” it’s just ads and suggested posts. Yes you can tap the logo then tap following to get a chronological feed but I want that to be the default.
This gets really fun if the only FB account is the one you use w. Oculus Quest. I just redirect all FB emails to the spam folder and check it only if there's a login I need to verify. (hide my email also helps)
This has been a noticeable shift, at least for me. From being bombarded with irrelevant click-bait notifications and random birthday reminders to get me to log back into the website, its now much calmer and relevant.
The "increased satisfaction" is likely a result of fb going overboard with notifications a few years ago. That phase led me to set aside time one day and actually go through all of fb's privacy settings to turn off all email comms or anything that could prod me to log back into the site. I also uninstalled the mobile app and my Android phone battery thanked me for it.
The best feature by far is the notification dot with the count when you're not (fully) logged-in in the browser. I only ever log in when there's really something that needs my attention. For the last couple of years, my feed is basically births, deaths, marriages - a high no. of posts are by people of a senior age, and the conversation in general just isn't relevant to me.
The fact that they’re acting like this is a shocking insight cracks me up. They pay this group industry leading salaries to learn what anybody on the street could tell them
Meh, a lot of group common sense is just wrong or even when it's right, we don't know the magnitude which is why more scientific testing is required. If you asked the average person on this site they would tell you user satisfaction would go up if they removed all feeds from the app and instead provided RSS links you could add to your RSS reader and then reply to posts using email.
I am starting to hate any service that constantly sends newsletters, feedback requests and other notifications. Usually it’s blatantly obvious that they are not to my benefit but only to their benefit. Facebook is bad that way, Doordash also sends me a ton of stuff that is never useful.
I just request closure of my Standard Chartered Priority account because they won’t let me proceed to dashboard after login unless I gave in provided them with system notification permission on iOS. Customer support said they talked to the IT team and they were it is for “customer’s safety” and then they also added - by that permission they get “the device” and that is also for safety. They also said no customer had raised this issue before.
If only Apple had made reporting of such problems transparent I would have reported this.
I don't really use Facebook so for me Spotify is the worst for notifications. I've gone through settings and turned off all of the notification categories (and there are a lot of them).
They still send me notifications, including notifications that I have notifications disabled.
It sure took a long time and a lot of words to state the obvious. What I’d actually find interesting is an exploration of the conditions that led Facebook to its current state of notification hell, unable to see the obvious errors of its own ways for so long.
I'm no expert, but it doesn't hard to come up with a reason for that. I'm sure every team thinks that their notifications are the most important, and they are all trying to prove the worth of their own section. Put all that together and you end up with a lot.
At that point it takes someone with both vision and decision making authority to say say.. nope.. They have to be specific about which ones are too much.
This ^. Every team wants to grow their sub app and thinks they deserve a place in the notification bar.
Now imagine that this is true as well to get access to whatsapp or instagram user base. I think whatsapp has really done a good job of not bloating the app and rejecting all these requests.
If only Instacart would follow along on this. Really annoying getting a buzz for every order I make (I do about 3 per week). And then I also have to dismiss a bunch of screens prior to the next order.
Interestingly, this is actually the biggest appeal of iOS to me. Been a huge android user since the beginning. Somehow iOS had way less notifications and I felt my quality of life go up.
i find this funny, some how facebook has my phone number and keeps texting me notifications... or maybe this is an account from who ever had this phone number before?
general reminder that facebook is a psycbologically damaging online presence with demonstrably predatory operational functions that ultimately serve to divide and conquer society solely at the benefit of late stage surveillance capitalism.
facebook has enforced the prosecution of womens rights in america and elevated platforms of hate speech and seditious rhetoric in numerous countries.
it played a quantifiable role in the january coup in the united states, and continues to promulgate american foreign policy through direct ties with the us government.
facebook maintains round the clock surveillance of nearly everything you do through your phone once the app is installed, and has faced little consequence for it.
Same. Years ago I found that thanks to the gymnastics Facebook had done in notification settings, I could no longer stop many of the notifications I didn’t care about - so I shut them all off, FB Messenger and all. Since then I open Facebook maybe once a month.
Just because something is "relevant" to me doesn't mean I want to be notified. Usually I don't.
I go out of my way to have zero unread notifications in any software I actively use, even if it means making liberal use of Mark All As Read. This lets me visually scan for where activity is without visual noise.
They already knew that and they were already not sending low quality notifications. What they didn't know is how relevant should a notification be for it to be sent.
My personal experience is that I was getting notifications for a unread posts in a group or a friend posting a video. Stuff that should have been in the news feed, not a notification. Not interactions with my interactions, which was my expectation. In other words, false positives. At the same time, they changed it at some point so someone replying to a post or comment you've made doesn't create a notification unless you've been tagged. False negatives.
No, the notifications they were sending were low quality.
Would it have been better if I said that they were not sending notifications that the system thought were low quality? Predicting the quality of a notification is not trivial.
Forgive my possible ignorance here, but to my mind, an irrelevant notification is a low-quality notification. Which, IMO, would indicate that they "were already ... sending low quality notifications".
The confusion is coming from both potential notifications and actual notifications both being called notifications.
Think of YouTube. Usually a comment on a video sends you a notification. This may make sense for small creators, but if a creator is getting thousands of comments they may not want to actually be notified of each one. YouTube has to decided if the notification for a comment on a creator's video is relevant enough for them to be sent an actual notification for it.
That also meant on many days I'd have no notifications at all. A week could go by with 0 notifications. Since the quality of notifications used to be so high, I used to treat FB notifications the same as I treat my email inbox (no email goes unseen).
Over time, they started jamming in "fake" notifications like "Your friend posted a new video!" whereas in the past, I'd simply have 0 notifications for the day. After that, it became impractical to keep up with the never ending notifications.
They need to be looking at the quality of their notifications rather than their frequency.