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I'm waging war against an ecosystem of developers intent to squander my attention

Not sure if you are being deliberately glib, but yes, that is exactly what is going on. They know damn well that your attention is valuable -- to them -- and they know that it is limited, so they are in an arms race with each other to capture as much of it as possible.

In that case, the more devs realize that excessive notifications have the opposite effect as intended, the better.

I wonder if they do.

They don't. The biggest thing people on HN tend not to realize is that they aren't the target market for this kind of stuff. Alerts drive engagement, otherwise devs wouldn't waste the time to put them in. Same with ads and analytics stuff, they are a nightmare to put in and maintain but it's the surest way to make money.

I hope eventually the metrics emphasis shifts from quantity of interaction to quality. Take a lesson from my hammer, which doesn't scream out from my toolbox every five minutes saying "tap me!".

You're missing the point. They don't give a shit about quality, they just want to make money off you.

To combat this, my default answer to "Can this app send you notifications" is always no. Then later I used the notification settings to turn on the ones that I think are important enough, and then usually that's only on the home screen, no buzzing. Sometimes I only allow the red dot.

I like to turn off all notifications (noise, vibration, and lock screen) other than audio calls. All other messaging is asynchronous and shouldn’t be important enough to disturb your focus. On iOS, I even move the apps that have the little red numeric notification circle to a different page than the first, so I don’t see it until I want to see it.

You can turn the little red bubbles off.

Go to Settings Search for notifications Go to the specific app and turn off Badges

My normal routine is that turn them all off, then go back and turn on the specific ones I want. But it turn off the badges for virtually all of them.

Thanks, I wasn’t aware that’s what a badge was!

Having a home page free of little red circles changes how you look at your device. It is freeing and a breath of fresh air. It is amazing what a psychological impact these red badges have over us.

I recently turned off all notifications. Messaging apps can still have badges. As a former developer for a notification sending product I feel stunned at how much I’m preferring this setup.

Just removing my email from the home page so I have to go to a web interface instead has made me far less neurotic about checking it. Before I’d check hourly, now I check it a couple times a week. And nothing bad has happened because of it.

You can also set the phone to monochrome: the bubbles are still there, but they aren't red, which makes then much less distracting.

I shut almost everything down, but for messaging, too many of my friends are busy much of the time. So if we are to have a conversation, I can't see their first text nine hours later.

I do sort of a compromise for my messaging apps. I silence all group chats but leave notifications on for direct messages.

This way I get avoid the distraction of group banter while still being able to be contacted directly when something more important comes up.

It makes for an interesting game of tug-of-war with yourself sometimes as a developer. We're currently building an app and will have what we feel is a great idea that will keep people coming back. A couple days later we'll get together and discuss if said feature is actually useful or addictive or if we'd be better off and more responsible by dialing it back or removing it entirely. No idea what the result will be, but I feel good about having these conversations.

Not to be too critical, but wouldn't it be a better idea to make this decision before spending a couple days of dev time developing something?

We hadn't begun development on the feature yet. These are just ongoing discussions where we bat around ideas we have for future cycles. Yes, ideally, we will instinctively get a sense for this without it taking a couple days. We probably already have. We're pretty early into our project and the most likely reason it took a couple days to reach the conclusion we did is because the meeting ran out of time that day.

Mostly I'm just saying it's an interesting topic to think about, and that I'm glad to have a CEO who cares deeply about not making something that adds to this addiction situation.

Gratifying but mostly forgettable and infused with advertising also describes broadcast radio and TV.

I remember back in the day one of the biggest concerns was how we could prevent the Internet from becoming like TV. We clearly failed, at least for the popular use case.