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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Know those little emails that Facebook sends you throughout the day? I've turned most of mine off, but I still like to know when people mention me, or get a page update.

Well, I figured out today that when Facebook has these, it doesn't necessarily send them to you right away. Instead it waits until it looks like you've bailed off the site to do something else. Then you get an email notification -- drawing you back into Facebook.

Yep. Pretty tired of it. Thousands of really smart people using the latest in tech to try to play me like a musical instrument.

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I don't use facebook, but couldn't that also be an optimization? Like don't send the user email notifications if they're already on the site where they can see the # of notifications?

But that's not what they're doing. I'll get mentioned in a comment while I'm on the site. I'll click over and read the comment and reply to it.

Then, once I'm away from the computer for 30-60 seconds or so (I'm sure they have a system training for this), I get the email notification -- even if the original back-and-forth occurred an hour ago. The timing of when I get the email has nothing at all to do with when the event occurred. It's completely dependent on my interaction with Facebook. Many times, it takes so long, I'm usually thinking "Wow! I wonder what else X had to say?" but I click over and it's the same damned thing I already interacted with.

This sounds like a bug / coincidence.

I've never got a later email about something that happened live while I was browsing the site, and was already notified about.

A couple of times is a coincidence. I stopped counting after seven.

So you're saying that there's a bug. And the bug waits for me to stop using Facebook, then emails me things from Facebook.

I find this quite difficult to believe. At the least, it's a very convenient bug.

They might be doing this to only a subset of their users, for example as part of an A/B test.

The bug isn't that you get emailed about things only after you've left, that's the feature.

The bug would be to get emailed about things that happened while you were using the site and were notified in real time about already.

From a revenue perspective, the behavior that the GP is describing IS an optimization.

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