Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels like a breach of trust.
I need the notifications for a taxi not marketing for groceries during the week
It may juice their stats, but I've definitely installed competitors apps when I need a taxi in a new place as opposed to just using the app I already have installed.
As a baseline have about half a dozen things on my phone that actually actively interrupt me. Calendar, alarms, weather alerts, banking, and, yes, messages from my wife. I have a few more that can send notifications but they don’t alert me, they all get rolled up into the “Notification Center” for me to review whenever I feel like catching up on them. (This includes direct contacts like SMS from anyone else on my “allow” list.)
During work hours Slack can notify me as well. If I get any notifications outside of work hours, they’ll appear when my phone goes back to work mode.
After 9pm the only things that can notify me are phone calls from a handful of people. The notifications will be there in the morning.
When I’m driving I can only receive phone calls from my wife.
This is a whitelist, not a blacklist. I have to consciously decide to receive notifications from something and when I want to receive them.
The focuses turn themselves on and off throughout the week without me doing anything.
If I’m expecting something (e.g., scheduled telehealth call), I’ll just turn focus off around the time I need to receive the notifications and deal with the firehose until it’s done. (Used to do the same for food deliveries and stuff until I moved to the middle of nowhere and stopped doing that.)
I truly don’t understand how people live with their phones otherwise.
That doesn't follow, IMO. I have tons of communication platforms that aren't allowed to notify.
Typing this all out, these are all young people things so i don't expect someone with kids and a mortgage to have the same experience but imagine if your sms app was littered with ads and you couldn't turn off their notifications without missing messages from your children needing assistance. That's basically the type of dirty attention capture these companies are engaging in.
If you don't understand why someone would use snapchat or other image based social messaging apps then you won't understand this particular issue as you don't have it.
I have Slack and MS Outlook on my phone for work, which are both communication apps, but notifications are muted.
It's stunning to me that Google let's them get away with pushing ads through notifications.
I also just think it’s a weird leaky abstraction to bubble up to user space. I’m just imagining my mom looking at a notification channels area in settings. It’s a weird thing to ask users to conceptualize. Also it’s not something you can really enforce at review-time. It would be something Apple and Google would need to constantly monitor — at any time a VC could ask their investees to turn the screws on monetization/engagement and an app could become a spam machine overnight.
Something better would be something like a non-removable option to report individual notifications from any app as spam, kinda like how it works will email. That way, Apple and Google could offload their monitoring overhead to machine learning models and punish companies acting in bad faith whenever there’s enough user frustration to justify punishment
I really just think individual notifications (not apps) just need an explicit “this is spam” report button.
I do that sometimes. Not that it matters, because rarely any notification seems to deep-link into an app these days.
But more importantly, how does it differentiate between "Your delivery has arrived" and "this weekend, 10% off all deliveries paid with mastercard from chase banks"
These are all trillion dollar companies, your allegiance is wasted.
>>that something Google has created works better
Does it? The system for categorizing notification does exist on android, but it's not enforced in any way by Google on the Play Store so most devs ignore it - do you take an issue with anything I said?
Of course changing any setting on Teams has catastrophic unpredictable effects on it... But at least they tried.
I tend to use "Focus Mode" turned on always in Android. Most apps are short lived (5 min after being opened manually), this reduces a lot of the spam. I automate extending this time using the same FilterBox to auto click the notification that the app will close in a minute, but only if the screen is turned on. So the app gets automatically disabled when I stop using the phone.
Probably through a pinky promise from the developers to call the right APIs.
IIUC it is up to the app developer to tag the notifications they generate as time sensitive (or not) for iOS
As long as they get flagged, they’d need to pay more and more.
Sometimes I think "should I install it" before getting one and get public transport or get on my bike instead.
I don't understand the credit part? Wouldn't some kind of "set your rate" option for the user, allow more individual flexibility? As opposed to a flat fee per notif, sent to Apple?
—⁂—
¹ I vaguely recall hearing that EU spam legislation would apply to notifications, but I may be wrong or misremembering. For my home jurisdiction of Australia, the Spam Act 2003 may or may not cover them; it depends on whether these things count as “electronic messages”, a term which is defined in the Act as “a message sent: (a) using: (i) an internet carriage service; or (ii) any other listed carriage service; and (b) to an electronic address in connection with: (i) an email account; or (ii) an instant messaging account; or (iii) a telephone account; or (iv) a similar account.” As a technologist, I would expect push notifications—that is, notifications sent by the app provider’s server via Apple/whoever servers to your device—to meet this classification; but that it would be less clear-cut with notifications generated directly by the app, as there’s not so obviously an electronic address involved.
Maybe (maybe!) large players will pay attention as they have a lot to lose and aren’t able to ‘dodge’ well. But there are millions of fly by night scam operations that come and go.
Only real solution here is, like email, user side filtering and infrastructure level black holeing of offenders.
As far as email is concerned, a part of the problem that leads to moderately generic spam is that addresses are often readily available, and there are then no technical means to stop the sending of the message (… though filtering can block receiving the message). The difference with push notifications is that each provider gets a unique address to send to, and you have to at least install an app or accept push notifications (on the web) before they get that address, which guards against the completely casual you-don’t-want-any-notifications crew.
Or... a float?
Apple isn't interested in fixing this, they allowed it to happen in the first place.
Similarly, a cookie blocker can't be a domain blacklist because the people on the list could sue, but it can be an obfusticated ML model.
best part is how all of these uis say "not now" or "maybe later" type of phrases cuz some overpaid PM thinks it will increase usage
Usually it's something like "Group x has a new post, click to read it now!" where X is a group I haven't visited in years and would never give me a notification before. So I click "Only get notifications for friends posts in this group" and then it happens again with one-three other random groups the next week.
It's all about trying to get the user to spend the most amount of time in the app.
If your app wakes me up with a pointless notification, it gets uninstalled for at least a month and a one-star review on both Apple and Android app stores.
For this reason I have a one strike policy for apps. One marketing notification and permissions are revoked. Missing out on surprisingly little although it has made me stop using some services entirely.
"But it's not as convenient!" I hear some yell. Then it's obviously not enough of a bother to you, so just suck it up and deal with their bad behavior.
Because until you take your money elsewhere, nothing will change. And why should it? They obviously haven't crossed a line for enough people. Which means it'll just get worse.
Society’s revealed preference is McDonald’s, watching YouTube ads, and letting apps send whatever notifications they want to.
In general people care about the trade offs between cost and convenience, between cost and style, and not at all about anything so mundane as value, privacy, or peace of mind.
Without government restrictions, is society's revealed preference also widespread use of hard drugs?
Ever since opium wars, unadressed drug use was a problem that required active internevtion.
Most of America is a "bait and switch" or a "rug pull." This article basically talks about those issues with workers. [1] America sayssss "work hard, be loyal, be honest, be virtuous" how America acts is "Reward lazy humans, reward dishonesty / backstabbing, reward vice (pride, lust, greed are pretty much America)."
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221... Stanley, Matthew L., Christopher B. Neck, and Christopher P. Neck. "Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 106 (2023): 104442.
Why do you even need a Starbucks app in the first place? Get a physical loyalty card.
Or, you know, have coffee at home
Nescafe Gold Instant coffee. Coffee is coffee, and this one tastes better than Starbucks'
I, as a consumer would appreciate this.
Instagram I had to disable from notifications entirely, so now I miss messages from friends frequently, because the app bombards you with so much unrelated junk.
I suspect these companies know this, they know we don’t want spurious notifications, but they abuse whatever notification policies the OS provides in order to deliver you them anyways.
You can't actually manage these notifications until re-opening the door, re-enabling them.
There are currently six categories in here. Who wants to take bets until these shift, nullifying the point?
I use Apple Pay exclusively at Starbucks. They haven’t a clue who I am.
Then I call them a jerk, turn off all nonessential notifications and give them one more strike.
Interestingly, this works half the time.
I’m waiting for Apple to eventually fix this and expect this is how they’ll implement local AI with having really nice notification filters of “block messages like this.”
Of course google could do this, but I don’t think they’re interested in reducing notifications and popups based on the number of times google asks if I want to sign in or use my local to improve results. I’ve clicked “no” thousands of times yet they persist in asking.
Google and Apple could instantly fix the problem (of co-mingling essential and marketing notifications) if they wanted to. The current situation is like getting opted in to "street signs and flashing billboards". It's stupid.
In general this is a fast way off my handset.
The problem is that these apps are essentially adversarial in their notifications. If you have a mechanism for “only the most essential notifications”, then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential” (looking at you Uber). Try to limit their notifications using “only is summary” or disabling them and the app will gleefully deny you all notifications, rendering it basically useless. Uber is particular is guilty for this - the app is conspicuously free of meaningful notification controls.
It's a bit of pain to turn it on before use, and off again afterwards, but I've realized it's much less stressful than having notifications popping up at all times.
YMMV
That's like getting spam mail from your bank. In the physical world this would be illegal
Apparently that last bit would probably not have survived an actual legal fight, but they never sent him any more junk mail.
(This was pre-GDPR, so perhaps things have changed?)
Perfectly legal.
For example I got an Apple Music notification the other day telling me how awesome the new Classic Music App is, or how the new season of whatever show is available in Apple TV+ is just fresh out of the oven.
I like their products, and even their services, but in this particular case, they're as bad as Uber, just at a different degree (I used to get an Uber Eats notification everyday until I uninstalled the app)
But at first, the app must ask you for notification permission to send any notification in the first place.
You can then turn on/off the self declared notification categories at the Android level but apps can be dicks and either not use the categories or misuse them.
then perhaps Apple should say to them “either don’t mark these kinds of notifications as essential, or you get removed from the App Store”?
I'm sure we'll get that soon. Enforcing notification categories is unfeasible for all apps.
They’re doing the psychological equivalent of slash-and-burn deforestation - there won’t be a next generation of engineers, just a legion of addicts with attention spans measured in microseconds, but it’s profitable this quarter, and that’s all that matters.
But careful the app developer that abuses this position, for they will more likely be the app I remove from my phone.
Uber is one egregious example of abuse of notifications + SMS spam
My phone is a tool, not a boss.
Airline apps haven’t been problematic though. I give location only while using the app. And I’ve never received advertising notifications.
It’s quite nice to pull down an eticket into Apple Wallet and have it on my watch.
Where it's possible to do the thing you want to do with a web browser (also with minimal permissions, natch), never install the app.
Come on, now. You're being unfair. It is also serves the purpose of being better able to collect data on you for sale to other entities which want to push marketing notifications at you.
I like to use the apps to activate pumps to avoid card skimming but lol I'll just use the other gas station chains not run by disrespectful corporate (even though I could just block the notifications in Android)
That is more forgiving than my policy. Under the same condition, that app gets removed from my phone.
Then, yes, the next step is just to remove the app and leave an appropriate review. A demonstrably adversarial app has no place in my life.
Yup, this is very easy to do on Android. Long-press any notification, and you can change the notification preferences for that app.
The first time I see a marketing notification, I gag that app permanently. Takes less than 3 seconds. If this also prevents that app from being useful, oh well, time to uninstall.
In theory, Android apps can also categorize their notifications, so I could selectively gag them. But this takes me at least 30 seconds to figure out, and it doesn't prevent that app developer from abusing their categories. So I almost never attempt fine-grained control, unless it's an essential app. Normally I just block all notifications permanently on the first offense.
I gripe at them pretty consistently and the various customer service people don't even know the basics of how the app functions. I'm sure someone is really proud that their campaign to harass all of their paying users has led to some number of subscription upgrades though.
They have an option to opt out of marketing notifications but they ignore it if you check that and still send sometimes daily notifications of sales through of their crap.
Sending too many emails or too many notifications has an evident and enormous cost when you measure it (in lost opportunities that effective notifications could bring you). If your employer does not know what the threshold should be and does not routinely cancel certain notifications or emails because they don’t meet that bar, they are losing a lot of money. It’s probably the most accessible and impactful project you could work on if you want to prove your value.
Perhaps not in the App but in the OS there is. On Android you can pull a notification to the side to reveal a settings icon. Open it and click the settings icon in the top right to reveal granular app notification settings and the option to completely disable notifications.
Now I’m shocked how often people’s phones “ding” at them. I’ve shared what I do, but most find it too scary that they will “miss something important.”
My long-term bet is that notifications will become the new “smoking” and Apple will update policies - eventually.
These app developers are taking advantage of an unrelated function the cell phone to spam people.
Too bad greenify is not being maintained anymore
It really feels like apps should be required by App Store policy to separate out their notifications into "delivery channels": at least, one channel for urgent/timely notifications, and a separate channel for "something has changed, no need to check right now" notifications. Where users should then be able to configure the notification policies on each of an app's delivery channels separately.
Then, every type of notification an app can send (i.e. every string-template for a notification message) could be required to be pre-classified with the delivery channel it will use at app version release time — with the App Store review team rejecting app updates if the update, in their opinion, misclassifies the "proper" delivery channel for a given message-template.
I just realized that Uber and Tinder spam me with such marketing messages and I don't remember ever giving them consent for that.
But another somewhat related issue: apps that are allowed to ignore your audio settings. I have my sound muted pretty much all the time and inevitably apps I use that have ads auto play them usually with sound on at a high level. It's quite aggravating.
Ah yes this is one of my pet peeve. I have resorted to block those notifications too and forced to check the app periodically for any update if I'm waiting for something. Those bastards rely on people eventually tired of that and let ad notifications through but so far I still stand fast. Although it helps that I rarely buy online.
My solution to your problem is to just open the app, it defeats the purpose of notifications but I order rarely enough that it isn't a really big problem.
However just sending people straight to voicemail doesn't work in a surprisingly high number of cases - I had a voicemail from a person that was just "Hello, hello, hello". Like WTF. Explain why you were calling, thats the point of voicemail.
So it just took a few days of turning off junk notifications whenever I saw them to totally clean them up. I now only get the ones I want.
I would pay serious money for an ecosystem that promised no enshittification creep, but sadly that is not on the cards.
My attention is a valuable resource for me, and it is limited. So it should be bought.
We should make sending notifications billable and let users set price for sending notifications to them. And voila - problem solved!
Though how I am able to use the phone this way is not cool at all. I realized a long time ago that I am checking the phone all the time anyway and there's no way I would miss anything.
Tech should serve us, but meanwhile instead of having terminals to the internet we are now the terminals to the internet. Push notifications and all manner of intrusive interaction have become the norm, not the exception that they should be.
Ahhh, Librus. Worse than useless.
Here's a email with a PDF containing important dates and updates about the cursive program.
Lol, great.
I suggested maybe a calendar instead but got the standard “it’s all too hard” responses.
Me: What does it do?
Calendar and notifications about new posts
Me: The website already does that, there's a button to click to subscribe to the calendar, another to subscribe to notifications, and you can "install" the website if you want, all with open standards
Surprising, I actually won the argument and they didn't waste their money.
Let’s go back to physical letters and notes in backpacks.
> Tech should serve us
This problem isn't really the tech, it's the people behind these messages. Complain to them. You shouldn't be getting "OMFG IMPORTANT MESSAGE" alerts that, when you click on them say "LOL PTA meeting is this Thursday, and we need someone to bring coffee." That decision is being made by a person who you should be able to find and share your concern with.
Good point, and it generalizes to pretty much all the social problems "created by" tech. The technology is fine. Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech, and/or is applying it in malicious ways. Focusing on ills of technology, while ignoring the people wielding it for wrong, is just a distraction.
“I don’t use email anymore. I need you to communicate any important information about my child’s education to me through other means. Would you rather send notices home with my child or call my home phone?”
Or some variant thereof. “I reviewed the privacy policy and have serious concerns, no longer agree with the terms of use and cannot use this platform.” (I’m sure if you go read it it won’t even be a lie; all the ones I’ve seen have been awful.) Or “My phone broke and I can’t afford a new one so I can’t check my email.” Or “I’ve had a religious revelation and will no longer be making use of any technology created after 1970.”
Once someone has to make an active decision to contact you instead of just mass-spamming the entire school with a button press I guarantee nobody goes “Yeah, I really should call jacquesm and ask if he can bring coffee to the PTA meeting.”
You might be the first person to ask for an accommodation but it doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, just that it hasn’t.
My daughter is a bit younger, but I’ve never used the various platforms, Facebook pages, etc that all the daycares are trying to use. They figure it out. Hasn’t caused any problems yet.
Instead, they make the decision to call you at 3:30pm to inform you that your child needs picking up asap today when they realise your kid hasn't been picked up yet, whilst every other parent found out about the need to arrange an earlier pickup in advance via the after school club's mailing list.
This may be more inconvenient than receiving a few irrelevant emails. Other stuff like being the only kid not in fancy dress or sports kit because nobody would ring you about that even if they were competent at handling the essential stuff may only be inconvenient for your child, of course.
How many cases of misuse implicates a structural flaw in a larger system? It's absurd to point the finger, over and over, at this or that "malicious" person. It's exhausting! They somehow keep getting incentivized to appear.
It should, but it's becoming more and more obvious that it won't and can't. Literally every economic incentive it pushing towards 1) making it crappier until it's just good enough to buy, 2) maximally exploiting its users.
The market won't save us, because a competitor who tries to gain market-share by not doing that crap will eventually turn around and join in the fun, once it's in their interest.
Mobile internet may end up as being a giant mistake. It opens up an entire superhighway of enshittification, makes us more dependent on centralized control, and doesn't provide a much better communication experience that the telephone network.
Literally, we could start fining phone manufacturers who allow notifications that aren’t direct messages.
Ban ads from public spaces while we’re at it.
Doesn't this imply, though, that there is some kind of market force which would allow such a competitor who isn't doing that to grab market share in the first place? What happens to that market share when the competitor eventually decides to change their trajectory - does it just disappear?
Imagine the food industry 20 years back. It looked like the end of the world - literal poison everywhere you look. Your arguments back then would never foresee today's organic food hype and vegetables craze.
Believe.
I'll believe it when I see it. But it's not looking good. Subscription streaming was supposed to be like that: you pay to get a "responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products." But it turns out showing people ads makes more money, so those products are pushing users in that direction.
> Imagine the food industry 20 years back. It looked like the end of the world - literal poison everywhere you look. Your arguments back then would never foresee today's organic food hype and vegetables craze.
Isn't that mainly an affluent consumer thing? And often subject to lies and nonsense?
I expect the digital equivalent to be something like Google's doing: changing their products to ostensibly "protect" user privacy, but in reality giving all the data to Google and locking out its competitors.
I've had an intuition that much recent ouroboric "technology for technology's" sake is actually more pernicious that it appears to be (at first glance).
Reading that essay helped crystallize the "why" behind that feeling.
I have a phone but it is always on silent. I've decided that it is not acceptable to remotely hijack my attention. No notification on my phone sent by some corporation is ever urgent and basically never requires my immediate attention.
I stop hanging out with these types of people. If online bullshit is more important than actual real life, what is even the point?
I leave on notifications for calls and calendar events. That’s it. Texts are silenced but appear on the lock screen. Everything else is a red dot only.
My friends point out how weird this is. But when I see multiple stacks of unread notifications on their lock screens, it seems exhausting.
It's a natural reaction, but these people are actually suffering from an addiction and for at least some of them (those who can take remarks and act on them) it's better to tell them in a friendly way that you are having a discussion.
Most people are aware that cutting off a discussion is impolite and undesirable, they just don't realise they're doing it.
That phone is more engaging to them than the conversation they're in, and if you try to tell them about it, they use all the same excuses that other addicts use, plus a few more.
Almost all phone calls I receive are "actual" phone calls though. And SMS still gets plenty of use as the lowest common denominator for new recipients, but in practice over 95% of my received SMS are from computers now
In some places the switch to these apps took longer (like France, because SMS had been free for a long time) but there is a fundamental asymmetry since SMS is free only for part of the users (so the others will never use it) while the apps are free for everyone. In the end, everyone ends up mostly using these apps.
Even I am guilty of that for both SMS and calls, having a single featureful app with contacts ordered by the most recent discussions descending (as in my country SMS is largely replaced by Whatsapp) leads to less friction than having to scroll through my actual phone's contact.
Seems messed up. What's the psychology with that?
Is it a FOMO thing? Should we feel insulted?
It's all stacked against you.
Same here, the only time it'll make noise is if my gf calls twice in a row or if there is a national nuclear war alert
Usually people use someone looking at their phone as an excuse to pull theirs out and start playing with it. Think refusing to do that yourself and just waiting for them to stop messing with it sends enough of a message.
I'd like to see a regulation requiring all notifications to be opt-in at app installation, with appropriate separation of notification categories, thereby putting the onus on the company to tell us why we should let them have our attention in each specific way.
I also think it's vital to have our phones silenced (including vibration) for nearly all notifications all of the time. But that's more for my personal benefit.
I think apple has a nice setting where you can disable all notifications after a certain time slot in the evening. But this only works in the evenings, during the day they can still spam all day long.
At this point i cannot trust application developers anymore so we probably need an additional layer between the application and the OS to filter the notifications. If applications do not want to give you fine grained permissions. All you can do is give the application the permission and then have an additional layer filter the notifications with some kind of firewall rule.
Also the UI would be a mess. UX would be terrible. Most people would probably ignore the massive list of options, and then complain later as to why the app isn’t notifying them :dead:
And have you never given your email to a company for a 15% off code? Happens all the time.
Nice try defending tech companies against regulation though.
1) He's dumb. Will click and install on any crap he comes by.
2) He doesn't know to operate his phone. Every now and then I take his phone and turn off notifications for the apps I saw that popped them.
#3: This one's mysterious to me as well. Somehow they (the notifications) get re-enabled back. I'm disabling notifications (to the best of my knowledge, navigating arcane settings paths), they disappear for some time then after a while, start popping again. No app ever asked me "I noticed you turned off notifications ... ahem, do you want them turned back on?". No, they just turn it back automatically ... when I navigate back to the arcane settings path hidden under some 3 to 7 unintuitive menu layers.. the setting's back on. Think "Settings .. Privacy protection .. special permissions ... notification access" ... each of these steps hidden among 10 to 20 other menu options. What chances does a kid have to fight this crap?
I dunno, just using the apps seems to enable them after a while. And it's not just "Malware Disguised As Game XYZ". YouTube, Netflix, Facebook... all these bounce back, on my phone as well. Just seems that not so often as on my kid's and also I disable them back promptly when it happens so it's a manageable level of annoyance.
My kid's phone though ... I call him and he doesn't reply. Why? Coze he turns the sound volume off, just so he can have some peace of mind. Otherwise it's "ping ping ping ping", relentlessly throughout the day and night.
>> From the article: "Half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day" .
That seems about right. It's maddening. Barely manageable as a tech-aware adult, in the hands of a kid, today's phone technology and it's inability to stop this crap it's the incarnation of evil.
Unless they have to pay ie for their bus rides or lunches via some idiotic app, then... some extremely limited debit card with no chance going below 0 maybe?
That’s brave. My parents handed me one when I was in 9th grade.
They’ve also fragmented the services even more in the process since each bus company has their own version of the app (it’s just a skinning of the base app). It means I need to check back and forth between two apps to see which buses are on time. Naturally you can only buy a pass that only works on one bus route. The ux is pretty garbage.
Dealing with public transport in rural England definitely made me appreciate the seamlessness of transport in London.
It sounds like they definitely need better UX, and the buses around here very much accept cash still (or special tokens if you buy ahead).
But yes, it’s not like the big yellow ones the rest of us know from The Simpsons.
Force the change, don't leave it up to others.
You can protect your kid for a while, but sooner or later your protection becomes a bigger problem.
And be prepared for everyone to call you a conspiracy nut. But you eventually let that roll off your back when you see how happy your kids are just being kids.
Most problems we face in our lives haven't changed a zilch - its simply interacting with people for whatever reasons. You don't need phone for that, in fact you should first work on handling face-to-face interactions and only then move to remote ones.
Kids can grok how phone and app works in few weeks through and through and much faster than you or me currently, so that they are not missing anything if they start later. There is very little to 'learn' by further usage of it, just feeding addictions.
Lets not act like parents are stellar in this, because more often than not they aren't and most issues with kids come from this direction (as a parent of small kids I really can't blame anybody else if we mess up something, not at this age)
I really do think the expectations from your friends when you're in your early teens in the current year, is that you have a smart phone. It's probably a major part of social life now, which would leave a kid pretty excluded. Not even touching the things in life that REQUIRE a smart phone now. (Restaurant menus, transit, maps, etc)
Our childhood is pretty much gone from existence, despite how modern it feels. I feel for the GP author, best you can do is make things as protected as you can.
But yes, I feel your sentiment is right. Although there has to be some moderation—I wouldn’t expose my children to the excess of social media. Internet addiction has messed enough with my life, the last thing I’d like to do is pass that on.
Call me a helicopter parent if you'd like, but we've found that our kids have strong friend support groups, and all the parents are now friends as well (or at least friendly), thus creating a healthy sort of community.
He's only got limits with respect to the time he spends on the phone or PC. So far hasn't discovered or been interested in "naughty" content.
I was forced to live in the "middle ages", communist Romania with no TV, no electricity, go to bed at candle's light, half an hour of cartoons on TV per week when that wasn't canceled to show the achievements of The Great Leader instead. I won't deny my kid access to entertainment and technology in the name of some dreamed up "Amish lifestyle / return to innocence" because there's no such thing.
You yourself have seen that your kid isn't ready to fend off the exploitation by himself. Setting up parental controls on the phone is in exactly the same category as providing him with food and clothing and shelter—you're supposed to do for him what he can't yet do for himself.
You can work on teaching him how to resist exploitation over time, but it's irresponsible to expose him to the worst excesses of capitalism while he's clearly so unprepared.
It's still mostly in their backpack and they regularly miss calls and messages from friends because it's always on mute and still in the school bag even though it's already evening =)
You need to normalise these things and teach how to manage it from an early age.
Like screen time is a completely normal thing in our family, it has been activated since the second they got the phone. Every app category has a specific daily screen time - the only ones with no limits are communication tools and educational apps.
"Normalizing" it akin to normalizing cigarettes - some kids could indeed manage to smoke only one a week, but most won't.
And don't let your 7yo use "apps are designed to create addiction through finely tuned positive reinforcement triggers", that's a given. Get them using apps that don't have that so that the move to "tuned addiction apps" is jarring even to them.
There's a corollary with alcohol. In countries where even kids get (diluted) wine at a young age with food - because it's part of the meal - they don't get the need to get f'd up with the strong stuff.
They get a mental association that alcohol is something you drink for the flavour and in moderation - it's not a tool for self-medicating mental issues.
Same with ads, we've been a DVD/BD/streaming-only household for ages so now ads on TV are a curiosity to the kids. We actually have a competition who mutes the TV fastest when the ads starts in the few occasions we watch something that has any.
I'm going to be that guy: this honestly just sounds like you're abdicating your parental responsibility and placing the blame on the tech. Yes, the tech is bad, but there's no reason why your kid should be subjected to the full weight of its awfulness besides that you let him.
Step one is to question whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age. I understand feeling the need to have them be able to reach you, and pay phones and school landlines are less accessible than they once were. But why a smartphone? Peer pressure is not a good enough answer.
If there is a compelling reason for a smartphone (like the other commenter whose school bus system inexplicably requires kids to have an app) then iOS has pretty robust parental controls from what I understand, but I personally would go further and buy an Android phone and install even stronger controls. There are FOSS Android apps that allow you to block everything except for a few whitelisted apps, and there are others that can impose time limits.
A pretty simple combination of apps can create an experience that is suitable to any age, gradually enabling more functionality as you trust him more. We've even done this with our 4-year-old and an old tablet, giving him access to Khan Academy Kids with a time limit.
It absolutely is. Enjoy having an isolated kid, I guess.
I heard this dozens of times, but in reality, having a phone, a tv, a gameboy isn't going to make a difference.
On the contrary, a kid without the latest consumerist gadget will likely have to develop social skills, and also will have to form new tastes and do different activities, such as reading, sport, etc etc - that will make him less isolated and a better individual.
Anecdata, but my son is raised in a home without screens, and he's the most sociable toddler of the playground. Probably because his dopamine receptors aren't overloaded and that he's enjoying the stimulation of social interactions!
When I was 11, I spent large amounts of time playing with my peers, unsupervised, around my neighbourhood.
In 2023, this is an impossible dream. Even in parts of the world where you wouldn't be arrested for child abandonment if you let a child that age roam unsupervised, general consensus is that it is simply not safe for a child to exist outside the home, school or a paid-for-by-the-hour supervised activity space without their guardian in the picture.
As a society, we've taken away all opportunity for unstructured, unprompted socialisation in the real world. Kids must either learn to socialise online or not at all, since this is all we have left them.
I had the same problem with my son running his phone 24/7 in DND, and this helped a lot.
Yet you continue to pay his phone bills.
Same for me. I usually call people back after an hour or two when I check my phone. I fucking wish Android had an option to disable ALL notifications BUT all calls.
Why not be more respectful? Parenting is hard. Maybe ask some polite, open-ended questions before jumping in as yet another judgmental stranger from the internet with zero skin in the game.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/phone-free-schools
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor...
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
This isn't something that can be solved with "better tech". It is something that is solved with "less tech" or "no tech" entirely.
I wrote a book on this topic too as a millennial who grew up as one of the first waves of smartphones and social media users. I firmly believe it contributed to mental health challenges. We need to find a point where we say we've had "enough".
Johann's book has some surprises toward the end, that go way deeper into environmental and cultural factors. He ultimately sees it as a collective/societal problem with collective solutions. Mine tries to advocate for mindful control and rejection of toxic tech and makes it a more individual battle.
It’s incredibly obvious that we should not be on our phones all time, and more so for kids.
It goes a long way towards relieving the anxiety of feeling there's something important but not remembering the thing itself or its temporal context.
i don't believe that. I love technology and always want to have access to a computer (although I also love leaving it off and using paper or analog tools).
But I have a pretty unforgiving standard for people-misusing-technology. Last week I went into a store I hadn't seen before, specializing in imported Asian liquors, drinks, cocktail stuff. I decided to buy a fruit drink. Approached the counter, pulled out a $5 bill, and the guy said 'oh we're not taking cash' and waved at the terminal. It would have been just as easy to whip out my card, but instead I said 'I don't shop at stores that don't handle cash' and put the drink back (though with hindsight I should have left it on the counter, or left the $5 and walked out with my drink, giving up the change).
This was rude behavior on my part. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, at least in the US. If you're polite, nobody cares.
But what's the point if nobody cares?
After a week of observing what worked/didn't work for me I enjoy my phone more and get the notifications I want when I want.
Before setting up the focus groups I definitely was receiving too many useless notifications damn near every hour.
To me, this sounds like teens - people, really, because plenty of people ‘somehow’ wind up in this exact situation, where ‘somehow’ there’s just too many notifications on their phone to keep up with, as if it’s some sort of inexorable force of nature that it’s futile to resist. It just comes off as such bullshit to my ears, it’s nothing more than unwillingness to take responsibility for your own choices, and to put effort towards arranging your environment in a way that suits you.
If your phone is doing things you don’t want it to do, your response should never be to just shrug and say “oh well I guess that’s the way things are for me now.”
Given how many times I see that same situation expanded to encompass someone’s entire approach to managing their life in general, I really shouldn’t be surprised - I just cannot understand why taking control of that stuff and working to resist the things you don’t want just does not seem to be a priority for so many people. They just let bad things happen to them. It’s mind boggling.
The fact that teens are struggling with this doesn’t even seem significant to me. This attitude is everywhere regardless of age.
It's not really an issue either, because doors are typically within a few metres from the street, and people answer fairly promptly when food was ordered (because you are hungry and your food is there, which would seem obvious).
A lot of restaurants are fighting back and do join Thuisbezorgd and whatever local iteration Just Eat/Takeaway has, but they also ask their customers to use their own website instead. It saves them a lot of money.
But yeah I like my OnePlus' physical "shut up!" switch!
I'm not making fun of you, it's just that your sentence made the similarities so painfully clear to me.
Much of their socializing has moved online. Parents have effectively encouraged this trend, despite complaining about phone time.
People are far less willing to let their children just hang around the neighborhood, or walk to a friend's home these days, which forces communication through phone or desktop app instead.
In America, often “walking to a friend’s home” is a 45-60 minute walk. Crossing multiple busy streets and the sad excuse suburbanites call “boulevards”. Suburban neighborhoods are often the worst as far as safety is concerned. Drivers don’t give af about pedestrians. Sidewalks non-existent or abruptly end.
Biking may reduce the travel time but still sharing those roads with highly irritable commuters finishing their 45-60 minute commute from hell. Bike infra in the suburbs? Paint up the road, add a sign indicating it’s a “shared lane” and that passes as “bike infrastructure” in some of these neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, this is not something new. It has been going on for decades. Want to know why the kid in the 90s-00s spent most of their time at home playing video games? That’s because it was the only thing to do in a suburban setting.
Apple should make a version of - Allow notifications for 1 hour.
Like how they have allow location use while this app is open.
Sooooooo much garbage notifications email and real mail.
In the name of earning a few more dollars, we subject most humans to incredible amount of decision fatigue. Future definitely isn’t a utopia.
That’s a great idea, the question is, how would you activate it? Ideally it would happen automatically when you eg placed a delivery order, but you couldn’t allow the app to control or it would be abused. But if it’s not automatic then most users would likely never use it (or even know it exists).
Now, notifications have replaced emails, and they are right in your face. Kids have not been educated on how to stop these things, and the average person seems to just let all the notifications and ads in.
The people pushing to make these notifications easier to push to people are to blame. Not the teens.
If you don't keep the avenues of interruptions into your daily life in check they will overwhelm you.
Everyone everywhere wants you to look at their thing or listen to their thing every time they have a new thing. You have to aggressively pare down what gets through and when.
Only the absolute most important things should be able to interrupt you. You can probably count those things on one hand.
Calls from spammers are not on this list.
Email newsletters are not on this list.
Notifications of new comments on a post are not on this list.
New articles on a publication you read are not on this list.
At the end of the day, everyone's list is different.
Turn off notifications on most things. Unsubscribe from most things. Push notifications off for most things. Persistent notification dots and numbers off. Sounds off.
Take your attention back. It doesn't always come naturally to learn this skill but in 2023 deciding if, when, and where you will pay attention to something is paramount.
You know where we need lots of marketing people? Mars. I think we should send them there first to build the consumer society that will be necessary for colonizing a new planet, perhaps in some sort of space Ark.
Signal is, and it's the only app I care to be notified by!
"iPhone users were not included because data collection access for detailed app usage (i.e., names of specific apps such as YouTube, Snapchat, etc.) was not available for researchers at the time of data collection." -- Methodology section of the acutal report: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc...
According to an April 2023 report from Piper Sandler, 87% of teens use iPhones (https://www.pipersandler.com/teens). If the CommonSense Media report doesn't include 88% of teens, then it is not representative of the majority of teens' use; it is only representative of teens who use Android devices.
This report is probably under-reporting teen smartphone use and notification overload.
A side-effect is that in 90% of apps notifications don't work, and it's really quite nice. The remaining ones that do work are apps where somebody put in the work to fall back to something else because they're actually important, like banking apps.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....
Some random suburb, especially where the parents aren't super educated, is usually going to be hell for this though. A lot of parents who don't know/care/are too impoverished in terms of time or knowhow, end up just using the smartphone as an all purpose babysitter (much as TV in the 80s and 90s) from toddler or even baby age on.
It's always been the case that when you choose where you live you choose what kind of peers your kid will have, and therefore, to a degree, what kind of person they'll become, but smartphones have dialed this effect up.
> Such a "highly stimulating environment" may affect kids' "cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don't think we know."
Then why are 11- to 17-year-olds even allowed near a smartphone?
Has anyone found any 'solutions' when managing technology with their kids? A colleague of mine has just a blanket rule of no smart phones until they're 14 and then no social media such as tiktok. His kids seem to respect it because they now see how silly everyone looks on their smartphones the whole time (having not been indoctrinated during their early teens).
Any other recommendations?
There is no ClickHouse dashboard metric for “infuriated the user”.
Some idiots at Apple apparently decided that users work for the software, rather than the other way around.
So if I want to sleep in, I need to remember to both put my phone in "sleep focus" and either change the Garmin notification hours, or just disable bluetooth.
I don't know if they know what DND is and how to turn it on. I suspect they do, but it doesn't cross their mind not to see an email or answer a phone call the moment it arrives.
Adults do not, while reading about teenagers as if the adult is exempt and better equipped to navigate this reality
In my experience, the way an adult deals with their phone is 100% based on if they are cohabitating with anyone, especially romantically, the ones with oblivious disruptive habits are not and have not been.
ever had a teen help you with a setting on your phone? their fingers FLY, they know the menus inside and out (yeah, I remember, like I used to)
Teens don't want to shut their messaging off, is the problem, cuz if they wanted to it would all be gone very fast.
"Teens inundated with teenness"
I don't get email updates for work accounts, limit slack notifications and still put everything in a work profile. When I'm not working, I turn everything off but my pager.
If you need me after my working hours feel free to page me, if IRS jot important enough to page then you'll have to wait until I get back to my desk.
You can limit notifications to direct mentions and times as well.
- Turn it off when you are not working
- Refuse to install anything related to work on your personal device
However every place I shop at takes the sales conversation as an invite to a marketing conversation. That's 90% of my emails.
If business was a dog it would be flatulent.
Defaults on smartphones today make them worse than the annoying, noise-making novelty toys you used to buy your neighbours kids to drive their parents crazy.
Make an app that scans those notifications and takes an action automatically.
During your teenage years there’s a lot more FOMO as you are trying to establish yourself in your peer group and the social hierarchy in general. This must-check-that-notification then compelled them to react to it, which generates more notifications in a feedback loop.
Compare that to now, when I’m in my mid 30s, if an app generates too many notifications I will revoke its permissions to notify me very quickly, all of my social interactions are more asynchronous and slower and deeper, since I’m not being interrupted by notifications all the time and am communicating on my own terms
Arguing that the social heirarchy is meaningless is utter nonsense because our work structures, family structures, political structures, friend structures, distribution structures, financial systems AND ENTIRE CULTURE is built upon social hierarchies, and while you might argue that the social heirarchy at high school is meaningless once highschool is over, the skills gained in navigating it will persist through the persons entire adulthood.
Parents shouldn't be so dismissive of teens and their attempts to fit in and be socially normal. It's extremely important, possibly more important than academics.
Compared to past worries like military conscription (often deadly), mass state propaganda, and the crazy political cultures of decades past, the threat today from phones to teenagers is pretty tame and even gives them easy access to real information and data so much better than the past allowed for hammering down nonsense ideas and dishonest, manipulative claims. These latter two things have always been thrown at kids, today they finally have immediately accessible tools for digging deeper like never in human history.
Also, for when phones really do get tedious with an overload of corporate marketing and promotion garbage (Thanks so many of you high-paid BigTech/AdTech workers later commenting against online BigTech advertising right here on this very site!), you see, all modern devices have these little physical and digital buttons that let you set parameters to their behavior. Unbelievable as it seems, by pressing them in certain ways, it's possible to mute all sorts of notifications and prompts. My phone is right beside me all day, silent and discreet as an English butler unless I actively open it and seek sometimes, all because i set it to shut the fuck up with just a few moments of touch and clicking around. Any teen can usually do the same just as easily.
I know that many on HN will blather on about "disinformation", teen self esteem through social media and so forth as modern phone-related risks. However, much of this too is exaggerated or describes dangers lighter than the youth isolation of the past, which kids before mass digital communication had far fewer avenues for escaping from through access to their own personal interests and circles online.
If one thing truly is a danger to teens in modern phones and digital communications via social media spheres, its not so much too many notifications as it is the normalization of total 24-hour surveillance by faceless entities "serving your interests" and the inevitable data collection that makes young indiscretions now ever more literally unforgettable in the worst sense of the word.