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I found a similar thing with email notifications. If you regularly login to FB and look at your feed they will leave you alone. Delete the app from your phone o

I found a similar thing with email notifications. If you regularly login to FB and look at your feed they will leave you alone. Delete the app from your phone or neglect logging in and you’ll start to get email notifications about the silliest things. Of course they don’t contain much more than “so and so shared a link” without any description of what was shared (trying to get you to login and look.) Not quite as bad as 2FA number, but irritating nonetheless.

Slansitartop 9y ago
Facebook has been steadily decreasing the usefulness of its email notifications in order to push more use of its app and website. The old notifications used to give you the content and allow you to reply through email, but not anymore. The notifications are also dark-pattern hard to manage. If you don't want a type, you have to wait to receive an example of it to unsubscribe. Their central notification page only allows you to re-enable particular notifications, but give no way to disable them individually. Facebook is a terrible product that can't die fast enough.
- newscracker 9y ago
  > Facebook is a terrible product that can't die fast enough. For the sake of humankind, I'd rephrase it as "Facebook is a terrible company that can't die fast enough."
mintplant 9y ago
Back when I had the Facebook app installed on my phone, if I didn't open it for a long period the "so-and-so posted an update" push notifications would eventually slow to a trickle and ultimately peter out altogether. But if I so much as touched Facebook, the floodgates would re-open and I'd be spammed with them throughout the day, until the process repeated and they died away again. In a weird way Facebook ended up conditioning me to avoid using it.
tankenmate 9y ago
I have blocked all of FB's allocated networks worldwide on my machine (via a look up of allocated IP space and fed into iptables / ipset).[0] So FB doesn't even get "phantom" traffic from me (indirect traffic from FB logos / js on random websites). I only log into FB a few times a year and only via a temporary VPS in another country and using an incognito browser tab. So now FB has taken to emailing me complaining that they are missing me and that I should log in. :) WAYNE: I don't own A gun let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack. STACEY: You know Wayne if you're not careful you're gonna lose me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222936 EDIT: fixed link to go direct to the comment
- tankenmate 9y ago
  I always enjoy a wee chuckle to myself every time I get down voted on HN for expressing humour; I feel like a modern common man G.B.S. 'My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.'
- kuschku 9y ago
  I know a few people that completely block every IP range owned by Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Most of that works fine, sometimes some shitty websites are on AWS or GCP or load JS frameworks from their CDNs, but the worst is: You can't connect from Android to their WiFi anymore. Android pings a Google server, if it can't open a connection, it immediately disconnects. In Android 8.1, there's no way around that anymore. You can try every setting in the WiFi settings, and it won't change a thing.
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    Can the response be faked?
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Probably, considering that domain is HTTP only, but why is this even necessary? Sometimes I do want to connect to a local network without internet.
wepple 9y ago
They may not realize, but they really badly reinforce why people leave. If you try and deactivate, there’s a horrible series of hoops to jump through which just make the service feel so desperate. If you minimize your usage, you get flooded with desperate emails trying to convince you to login. If you’ve stepped away out of fear it’s becoming a low-grade attention merchant full of bad practices, these tactics just reinforce the idea that you really really are doing the right thing backing away.
VMG 9y ago
Also they reset your notifications settings regularly. I have disabled the email notification settings at least 5 times but after a while they keep coming again.
mcintyre1994 9y ago
> If you regularly login to FB and look at your feed they will leave you alone. This is false. My nan has an iPad she basically only uses for Facebook, and her email is unusable because she has thousands of messages from Facebook. I have no idea why they send thousands of emails to somebody who logs in every day and never ever opens one of their emails but they do.

Slansitartop 9y ago

Facebook has been steadily decreasing the usefulness of its email notifications in order to push more use of its app and website. The old notifications used to give you the content and allow you to reply through email, but not anymore. The notifications are also dark-pattern hard to manage. If you don't want a type, you have to wait to receive an example of it to unsubscribe. Their central notification page only allows you to re-enable particular notifications, but give no way to disable them individually. Facebook is a terrible product that can't die fast enough.

newscracker 9y ago
> Facebook is a terrible product that can't die fast enough. For the sake of humankind, I'd rephrase it as "Facebook is a terrible company that can't die fast enough."

mintplant 9y ago

Back when I had the Facebook app installed on my phone, if I didn't open it for a long period the "so-and-so posted an update" push notifications would eventually slow to a trickle and ultimately peter out altogether. But if I so much as touched Facebook, the floodgates would re-open and I'd be spammed with them throughout the day, until the process repeated and they died away again. In a weird way Facebook ended up conditioning me to avoid using it.

tankenmate 9y ago

I have blocked all of FB's allocated networks worldwide on my machine (via a look up of allocated IP space and fed into iptables / ipset).[0] So FB doesn't even get "phantom" traffic from me (indirect traffic from FB logos / js on random websites). I only log into FB a few times a year and only via a temporary VPS in another country and using an incognito browser tab. So now FB has taken to emailing me complaining that they are missing me and that I should log in. :) WAYNE: I don't own A gun let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire rack. STACEY: You know Wayne if you're not careful you're gonna lose me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15222936 EDIT: fixed link to go direct to the comment

tankenmate 9y ago
I always enjoy a wee chuckle to myself every time I get down voted on HN for expressing humour; I feel like a modern common man G.B.S. 'My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.'
kuschku 9y ago
I know a few people that completely block every IP range owned by Google, Amazon, or Facebook. Most of that works fine, sometimes some shitty websites are on AWS or GCP or load JS frameworks from their CDNs, but the worst is: You can't connect from Android to their WiFi anymore. Android pings a Google server, if it can't open a connection, it immediately disconnects. In Android 8.1, there's no way around that anymore. You can try every setting in the WiFi settings, and it won't change a thing.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  Can the response be faked?
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Probably, considering that domain is HTTP only, but why is this even necessary? Sometimes I do want to connect to a local network without internet.

wepple 9y ago

They may not realize, but they really badly reinforce why people leave. If you try and deactivate, there’s a horrible series of hoops to jump through which just make the service feel so desperate. If you minimize your usage, you get flooded with desperate emails trying to convince you to login. If you’ve stepped away out of fear it’s becoming a low-grade attention merchant full of bad practices, these tactics just reinforce the idea that you really really are doing the right thing backing away.

VMG 9y ago

Also they reset your notifications settings regularly. I have disabled the email notification settings at least 5 times but after a while they keep coming again.

mcintyre1994 9y ago

> If you regularly login to FB and look at your feed they will leave you alone. This is false. My nan has an iPad she basically only uses for Facebook, and her email is unusable because she has thousands of messages from Facebook. I have no idea why they send thousands of emails to somebody who logs in every day and never ever opens one of their emails but they do.