Facebook increased satisfaction and usage by sending fewer notifications

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.)

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 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.

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.

For me, the decline in notification quality started with the rise of FarmVille.

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

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.

> 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'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.

I deleted my account.

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 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 dont use Instagram, but occasionally I'll take a look to see if friends have posted anything.

Then seemingly at random it starts showing me short-form sort-core porn videos.

Instagram used to be about fun and creativity, now it's a trashy tabloid that's entirely made of Page 3 content.

> 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.

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 :)

You used to be able to hide the red notification with uBlock Origin. I don’t know if it still works though.

> I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.

And as a revenue-generating set of eyeballs they can monetize and sell to said video content creators.

FB Purity. Warning, it's slow as dirt but it does all the tricks.

https://www.fbpurity.com/

It's so bad I think this needs to be done with legislation. I wish I could write laws.

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.

There comes a point when the world feels like a constant Ryanair checkout flow. Upsell after upsell. This is what A/B testing does over time.

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.

I feel strongly that infinite scroll needs to be either illegalized or heavily regulated.

I agree, the number of notifications on LinkedIn is just ridiculous.

Even if I disabled pretty much everything, I regularly get a new useless kind of notification on my phone.

The noise has become ridiculous, even for expected things. Luckily smartphone OSes have good notification handling nowadays.

I for one stopped using email push ony smartphone when my hosting provider started sending out invoices at 1am. Who thinks that this is a good idea?

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.

> 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)

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

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" strikes again.

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.

It's funny, DoorDash notifies me in triplicate in various mediums about my order except when they cancel it and never notify me.

Can you not just disable them at the OS-level? I do this to plenty of apps.

I don't think I ever get spotify notifications currently. I probably did the above. (Android)

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.

Trying to win back all the upset HN users

There’s different kinds of haters.

The ones that don’t use the app yet find it outrageous that other people find utility in it.

The ones that use the app and notice the move away from a useful tool to a Frankenstein app with no coherence.

They were already not sending notifications that were predicted to be rated below 4 out of 5.

The question of if removing notifications that were predicted to be rated 4 out of 5 is not so obvious.

Anyone can build a bridge that will stand. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that will just barely stand.

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.