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Comment by spacelizard | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed Facebook seems to be really good at spamming me with useless notifications, it even somehow manages to do it after I've unfriended 90% of the people that I am not close friends with and blocked most notification types. Yeah I could prune my friends list even further and only check it passively, but then all I'm stuck with is basically an incredibly bloated email/chat service that is loaded with ads. Then again this is the 21st century, a lot of other tech products seem to fit that exact description too. In any case, I'm a lot happier after deleting it.

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Some time last year Facebook began giving me notifications within the application that... "Your friend uploaded a photo" or "your friend updated their status."

Maybe this is because I stopped using Facebook for so long, there weren't any real notifications to give me. They wanted it to seem like I'd missed something.

I don't use Facebook that much, but I definitely used to associate a notification with something important, like being tagged in a status / photo or invited to an event. Since a year or two ago for me as well, it's usually useless or sometimes a straight-up advertisement. If you admin a group, you'll even get the "boost this post" messages as notifications.

Yes, it does this when you stop using it, also it will spam you with "do you know person Foo?" messages. I guess is because they assume you stoped using it because your timeline was boring.

Source: I have the same experience.

Biggest mistake I did with my Instagram account was to link it to my Facebook. I believe it is impossible to unlink them, even having disconnected all external application access as far as I could go in both.

Why? "Your friend Xxx is now on Instagram". Etc etc. I don't want to know, and I don't want my account visible to everyone there. Please just respect my wishes to make the integration go away!

I turned off all Facebook email notifications and I'm much happier with it now.

I recently spent a week out of any mobile signal range and when I got back, I had email from FB (normally I don't get notifications by email, just in the app) for the most banal things like "Friend X has just uploaded a photo!". FB definitely enters panic mode if a regular user doesn't use it for a short while.

Can't you just disable notifications from the Facebook app? Android allows it, and I reckon iOS does too. I found this to be a nice solution to deal with obnoxious apps because you remove the annoyance but can still use them should the need arise.

Or uninstall the app, the mobile website works well and doesn't slurp your battery in the background.

Unfortunately you can't on most phones ... Facebook is a system app.

Can't those be "disabled" via the app manager? I'd flash a custom ROM if I had to deal with FB being a "system app"(!).

Not every phone can be rooted though :(

But yeah: The app can be disabled at least.

You can disable notifications, but on Samsung android you can't get rid of the red badges without disabling them for all apps.

I had the impression that it was a probing thing. Trying to figure out who in my friend list I'm interested in keeping up with. Annoying enough that I decided to uninstall the app.

This might be something to do with effect of not winning every time: it's studied method to get and keep us addicted. You will get a bigger dopamine hit when only some of notifications are "wins" like tagged photo etc. Slot machines are a great example of this along with other gambling.

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