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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,
by fmajid 4y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 4y agoI'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.
- fmajid 4y agoWell, 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 https://majid.info/adblock.txt
- dredmorbius 4y agoRight. 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".
- kshacker 4y agoFunny 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 :)
- fmajid 4y agoBoth apply to those who use their knowledge for manipulation and exploitation purposes.