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Comment by grose | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this in social networks as well. If you don't get enough transactional notifications for a while they start making up fake ones like Twitter's "in case you missed this Tweet", Facebook's "[someone] posted for the first time in a while", all the while lighting up the notifications badge. Leads to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario in which I stop trusting notifications entirely and just ignore them, possibly missing out on actual useful ones.

I really wish companies let us turn this kind of thing off, or better yet stopped trying to boost "engagement" numbers by violating your user's trust.

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That's because the social networks employ armies of industrial psychologists with PhDs who figured out that notifications generate a little squirt of dopamine, and are thus addictive, as opioids are just an approximation thereof. That's why they won't give you an option to turn off notifications, just as they won't let you take control of the ordering of your feed, or offer RSS feeds for it.

There is literally nothing on social networks worth notification. Disable them already.

I'll hack site CSS to disable any nags.

uBlock Origin's element remover is excellent for this, though I often go directly into CSS using Stylus, a CSS management extension for Firefox and other browsers.

I also don't use any mainstream social media apps.

Mastodon and Diaspora* limit notifications to other users' actions only.

Well, I have my browser (Vivaldi) set to automatically block desktop notification requests without even asking (the default is to ask) but as you point out many sites will also show an obnoxious banner and yes, uBlock is a good solution to that.

I'm surprised EasyList lets so many of these through, so I built my own (very few rules for now):

https://majid.info/adblock.txt

Right.

All desktop notifications are blocked.

Sites will still throw up their own notification icons --- for many that's a dark-patterns false icon (e.g., appears w/o any account). That and a whole host of other annoyances: chumboxes, overlays, interstitials, fixed headers /footers, social link-litter, "engagement" stats, newsletters & other registrations, nags, cookie banners, etc., etc.

The set of CSS hacks I'd created for Buzzfeed a few years back was pretty remarkable. Stripped of its cruft, the site was ... moderately tolerable. (It was, of course, still Buzzfeed...) I called it "unBuzzed".

Funny I mentally read "psychopaths" when you said "psychologists" ... my mind was already set while reading the other comments, and something made me go back and re-read your comment to realize the difference :)

Both apply to those who use their knowledge for manipulation and exploitation purposes.

Linkedin is just the worst company ever doing stuff like that, I try to disable all their notifications and almost never engage with anything there (and I check the platform maybe 3-4 times a year max), and they continue to try to tell me some people more or less in my network are doing things I never cared about. God I hate this company.

Yeah this has annoyed me for years. They have notifications for literally anything. I keep disabling notification types on LinkedIn and they just keep making new ones up

The linkedin website works fine on mobile unless you're a power user or something.

The weirdest one is the security notification I get in my email whenever I login. I get an email saying Please verify your device - click this link to continue signing in - but I'm already signed in. I've never clicked the link and sign in works correctly anyway.

My down folder is full of email from linked in that I gave tried to disable a handful of times and have now given up. How does any of their email still get accepted?

> How does any of their email still get accepted?

That’s also something I do not understand. I don’t get how their domain isn’t flagged everywhere with a very bad reputation given the amount of spam they produce.

Apple kept a notification badge on my settings icon for Apple Pay until I finally went in and opted out of it. Under the guise of “Finish setting up your iPhone”.

It’s not a big deal I guess, but annoying and obviously promotional. Now I partially associate Apple with intentionally annoying.

There's also no way (that I've found) to turn off notifications if you have an Apple Card. It automatically sends you a notification the next day telling you how much you 'saved' via their cash back feature. This actually discourages me from using their card because I hate getting the notifications.

You can turn off those notifications, just probably not in the manner you would expect:

https://www.imore.com/how-to-enable-or-disable-apple-card-no...

Which reminds me, I need to get with Apple Card support to find a workaround for the bug where I get notifications for my spouse’s purchases (and vice versa) despite having toggled the switch enough times to have worn a dull spot on the screen. Thankfully we are a couple who don’t really care about the purchases, per se, it is just fucking annoying.

Ah very cool, thanks! But it looks like this turns off notifications for 'Transactions'. Does that disable the next-day notification to tell you that you saved 57¢ yesterday?

No, that is in the Apple Cash card settings, similar to where it is for Apple Card. Wallet/Apple Cash/three dots/Notifications.

Oh wow...amazing. Never would have thought to look in the Apple Cash card settings, since that's merely the place the Apple Card reward cash are deposited.

Apple’s big push into services has been slowly but surely chipping away at the generally pleasant experience of using their platforms. The price of entry was always high, but once you were through the door you were never really upsold.

Not so anymore. Numerous nags in settings to buy AppleCare or start a trial of some service or other. The App Store is particularly egregious: as well as search ads there are now occasional modal prompts to enable marketing notifications with my most hated dark pattern of all—only offering “yes” or “not now” as options.

The entire point of Apple, in my mind, has been their focus on user experience. It's weird seeing them lose their way every now and then. I wonder what's going on internally because no sane designer would sign off on some of these ideas.

The App Store on my iphone is only useful for installing apps I've searched for externally. Browsing categories is buried as a search suggestion?

I don't know if Facebook still does this, as I've completely nuked it from my life, but when I had an account I asked it to turn off all email notifications. But if I didn't log on to Facebook after about two weeks I would get an email saying they were concerned I would miss out and so they helpfully turned email notifications back on for me.

I didn’t use Facebook for a few years and they sent me a completely fake account security notification. I was super mad about it.

Sometimes when they created a new feature (eg. Groups), they would email everyone about activity on it even if email notifications were off.

Since I couldn't turn off "in case you missed this Tweet," without turning off everything including reply and DM notifications, I no longer get any.

And use it a lot less now, so good job, Twitter!

This is one thing I actually like on android: you have fine gained control over not only which apps can send notifications but also which kinds of notifications a particular app can send.

So it's usually easy to just turn off all the annoying ones, while keeping the useful ones.

This started happening enough on the Twitter app for me that I just ended up uninstalling the app. My account still exists, and maybe there are some real notifications there, but it's probably been close to a year since I actually checked.

In the case of Twitter this also permanently broke notifications for my account. It now shows exactly 2 notifications all the time. Both tell me that someone I follow posted a tweet, as if I was too stupid to scroll down the feed myself.

But in return I don't ever get any other notification. The only way to find out whether someone answered my tweet is to manually dig through my own profile.

Needless to say, I don't use Twitter anymore. Because of this, and because 80% of content I saw was just a stream of pure negativity.

It's actually possible to fine-tune it by category of notification (Settings > Notifications, either in app or on the web). I turned off Reminder, Friend Updates, and People You May Know, leaving only the notification on things I interact with or things friends brought to my attention.

Lots of companies dump all notifications into the same bucket, either out of laziness, or purposefully to make it less likely you turn off their spam notifications (looking at you Oculus).

Facebook only appeared to divide notification into categories when its data misuse unfolds. Several years ago (if I recall correctly), turning off one broad category will indeed nuke the "nagging" notification, but also turn off legitimate ones as well.

It doesn't matter what you set any of these things to, if you leave your account idle for a while you'll start getting made up notifications again to try to draw you back in. Both Facebook and Twitter do this, though ime Facebook's tend to work better just because I have marginally more reason to care about any given person on my FB feed than the much more eclectic set of people my Twitter is connected to.

Strange, I've never seen a Facebook or twitter notification. They both have notifications switched off and android respects that.

My twitter account goes weeks without being accessed.

>I really wish companies let us turn this kind of thing off

Well, if you are not paying for the service with your money, you are paying with your attention. And this is the mechanism to extract additional attention from you, and it works very well.

Disagreed. This garbage happens even with paid services, in fact the service in the article is a restaurant chain.

I think this self awareness to disable notifications if they abuse it mostly only occurs for engineering types or other people with a lot of self control. It remains a powerful engagement trick because it hooks into the brains of people with less mental stability, like people with adhd etc (which for all the mental health awareness tech platforms tries to align themselves with would appear to have the opposite effect).

In that case i will go above and beyond to get rid of their ads. uBlock, DNS Filtering, iOS Jailbreaking ...

Never used https://adnauseam.io/ ... but mhmmm maybe it’s the next step.

Install the extension, load Twitter end set up endless scroll or Puppeteer script. Adnauseam would click EVERY ad it sees.

None of that will prevent unwanted notifications.

based on my experiences dealing with this, facebook and instagram absolutely let you fine-tune your notifications, account-wide, with a surprising degree of control. Twitter didn't last time I checked. No other social media I use consistently has the problem

I think Tinder is one of the worst offenders. It spams you daily about why you should be swiping, but you kind of need to have notifications since its a chat app.

I have a folder on my phone called "Notification Jail" where all the misbehaving apps get ignored.

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