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Facebook increased satisfaction and usage by sending fewer notifications
- kristopolous 4y agoWhat?! Spamming people with low quality garbage isn't a sustainable high yield strategy for long term engagement?! Stunning, just stunning!
- charcircuit 4y agoThey 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.
- darzu 4y agoCitation? I got a lot of crap notifications for years and years and have completely abandoned FB at this point b/c of the low signal to noise.
- charcircuit 4y agoFrom the article >rather than our usual operating model of sending all relevant notifications (either rated 4 or 5 on a scale of 1–5)
- some_furry 4y agoRelevance isn't a sufficient metric. Just because something is "relevant" to me doesn't mean I want to be notified. Usually I don't. I go out of my way to have zero unread notifications in any software I actively use, even if it means making liberal use of Mark All As Read. This lets me visually scan for where activity is without visual noise.
- charcircuit 4y ago>Just because something is "relevant" to me doesn't mean I want to be notified. By definition a relevant notification is something you want to get a notification for.
- some_furry 4y agoYour algorithms cannot quantify relevance, then, because it's inherently subjective. What might be "relevant" to most people will not be relevant to me.
- kbos87 4y agoSame. Years ago I found that thanks to the gymnastics Facebook had done in notification settings, I could no longer stop many of the notifications I didn’t care about - so I shut them all off, FB Messenger and all. Since then I open Facebook maybe once a month.
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- chazeon 4y agoFor a user's satisfactory, I really think any notification should be opt-in instead of opt-out for anything other than direct message. Facebook's blue app is one of the first apps I had to turned off the notification entirely. If I really care about some one who just upload a photo I will go into your app to take a look. These notifications are now just baits for the ads.
- tayo42 4y agoIt's so bad I think this needs to be done with legislation. I wish I could write laws.
- kaashif 4y agoWhat exactly needs to be done with legislation? There should be a law to ensure you turn off the notifications on Facebook?
- tayo42 4y agoEnsure that we don't get pointless notifications that exist only to increase engagement and have these on by default. Take advantage of feelings of fomo. You ever actually go turn off notifications? They have obscure names and there's tons of them in some apps. I don't want to waste time and energy fighting back apps constantly. Healthy defaults to start with
- chazeon 4y agoThe best bet you can get is something like App Store guideline rather than law, I think.
- darzu 4y agoWhy? It’s our government (in theory), no reason we shouldn’t make laws to the benefit of the people. When the private sector consistently refuses to self regulate bad behavior, the law can and should step in.
- smrtinsert 4y agoFacebook looks like a trusted resource against Twitters madness.
- yellow_lead 4y agoMore notifications increased satisfaction by a small amount as well - when dissatisfied users like me deleted our accounts because of them. Technically, overall satisfaction increased by removing us from the survey population.
- burnte 4y agoYeah, 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.
- bentcorner 4y agoI think they're useful for some PWAs. I give gchat notification perms on my desktop which is a nice feature.
- ttt3ts 4y agoMy web based email client has notifications allowed. I am pretty happy browsers added support for this. It is disabled by default and easy to say no forever if a site is annoying about it.
- emkoemko 4y agoi find this funny, some how facebook has my phone number and keeps texting me notifications... or maybe this is an account from who ever had this phone number before?
- 1270018080 4y agoIf I get an ad through a notification, that app loses it's notification privileges forever.
- civilized 4y agoFor years there has been a big red notification dot stuck on the FB video tab reminding me that I have some large number of shitty videos to watch. I have no idea how FB decides precisely how many shitty videos it is very important that I watch. It used to be in the 40s, now it's 15. I never clicked the tab once. I actually tried to figure out how to get rid of this at some point, but it definitely wasn't a priority for FB to give me control over this. I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.
- guerrilla 4y agoFB Purity. Warning, it's slow as dirt but it does all the tricks. https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
- deanc 4y agoThere have been numerous cases of fb purity users having their Facebook accounts banned. Use at your own risk as Facebook is quite clear about extensions that alter the experience being against TOS.
- guerrilla 4y agoDo you have a source for that other than the developer being banned[1] in 2012? 1. https://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-legal-team-have-told-me-i-am-banned-from-facebook-because-of-f-b-purity/ https://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-legal...
- fbpdev 4y agoThis is false information. No FB Purity users have been banned because of using FBP, they may have been banned for doing other things, but I have had no reports of users being banned for using FBP. There is no documentatry evidence for your claims, and you should not go round telling people fake news like that.
- guerrilla 4y ago
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- epolanski 4y agoImagine needing a data team to find out people only want notifications for the most relevant information and not be spammed for every idiocy. Imagine needing to spend tens or hundreds of millions to have an answer every single user could give you for free. You got to love the age of information and social media, gives so many people jobs.
- charcircuit 4y agoThey 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.
- TwiceCubed 4y ago[dead]
- dmitriid 4y ago> What they didn't know is how relevant should a notification be for it to be sent. Oh, they know. They definitely know. What they didn't know is the ratio "(engagement + monetisation)/useful notifications"
- jjulius 4y agoForgive my possible ignorance here, but to my mind, an irrelevant notification is a low-quality notification. Which, IMO, would indicate that they "were already ... sending low quality notifications".
- charcircuit 4y agoThe confusion is coming from both potential notifications and actual notifications both being called notifications. Think of YouTube. Usually a comment on a video sends you a notification. This may make sense for small creators, but if a creator is getting thousands of comments they may not want to actually be notified of each one. YouTube has to decided if the notification for a comment on a creator's video is relevant enough for them to be sent an actual notification for it.
- muglug 4y agoThe notifications used to just be stuff directly applicable to you (X tagged you in a photo etc). Then the demographic that advertisers really care about — affluent Americans in the 25-49 age bracket — stopped using Facebook.com every waking minute, and product managers panicked. Their solution was to add more content to one of the most-clicked areas of the UI (I bet at least one product manager got a nice stock bump based on that change). Short-term gains are great and all, but the change smelled of desperation, and had utterly predictable long-term effects. And now we get a blog post telling us what should have been obvious to begin with.
- baby 4y agoI 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.
- willhinsa 4y ago"... Surprising no one without an active ad revenue addiction"
- some_furry 4y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" strikes again.
- bburnett44 4y agoThe 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
- Gigachad 4y agoMeh, a lot of group common sense is just wrong or even when it's right, we don't know the magnitude which is why more scientific testing is required. If you asked the average person on this site they would tell you user satisfaction would go up if they removed all feeds from the app and instead provided RSS links you could add to your RSS reader and then reply to posts using email.
- pleb_nz 4y agoFirst thing I do to all OSs I'm using. Disable all notifications for everything except DM from family and friends. If I want to know about a new email, group message or some other random thing I'll open the app or site and take a look. Otherwise leave me the ** alone.
- foepys 4y agoThe 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?
- glitchcrab 4y agoWhy do you have your phone configured in a way which notifications can wake you at night? The only time I see notifications between 2100-0700 is if I actively look at my phone.
- foepys 4y agoIf I'm out at night I want to see if my friends text me. Fixed hours for silent notification are stupid and only work for people that don't have a social life. In the early days of Android there was an app which was able to set my phone to silent based on nearly unlimited inputs, like location, time, app notification, weather, etc. The relevant API was patched out with Android 5 or so, one of the most stupid decisions ever.
- mikebenfield 4y agoIf at any point your setup was configured so that emails sent at odd hours bothered you, that’s on you. Email was always meant to be asynchronous. The sender should never have to wonder if it’s a good time for you.
- clnq 4y agoOn 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.
- cj 4y agoOne very notable difference between Facebook circa 2010 and Facebook circa 2020 is notifications circa 2010 had a very good signal to noise ratio. Basically 100% of notifications were ones I wanted to see. That also meant on many days I'd have no notifications at all. A week could go by with 0 notifications. Since the quality of notifications used to be so high, I used to treat FB notifications the same as I treat my email inbox (no email goes unseen). Over time, they started jamming in "fake" notifications like "Your friend posted a new video!" whereas in the past, I'd simply have 0 notifications for the day. After that, it became impractical to keep up with the never ending notifications. They need to be looking at the quality of their notifications rather than their frequency.
- pflenker 4y agoFor me, the decline in notification quality started with the rise of FarmVille.
- dlivingston 4y agoThe implications of this being what?
- nullsense 4y agoYou need to water your crops.
- pflenker 4y agoI never played FarmVille, but some friends did, and FarmVille sent notifications to your friends as well. Only a handful of friends playing FarmVille meant 1-2 daily notifications from that game. Notifications were effectively unusable at that point, until Facebook separated game notifications from other notifications. After that, it never really got any better, for me at least. Notifications tended to be less relevant than before and I disabled them on all devices.
- cuteboy19 4y agoI only ever used Facebook for farmville
- Yorch 4y agoI don't have a bad opinion about Facebook because I don't use it.
- baby 4y agoThere’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.
- mgraczyk 4y agoI haven't been at facebook in a while, but seeing that chart at the top which shows the goal metric increase and become statistically significantly higher still makes me subconsciously very happy. One thing a lot of people outside the company probably don't realize is that every team at Facebook is different and the culture of experimentation varies greatly from team to team. When I was there, the people who worked on stories ranking were very serious about user satisfaction and thought deeply about whether changes were good for the user even beyond what could be measured via metrics. I worked a tiny bit on notifications experiments at Instagram (wasn't on a team but monitored and changed some ongoing experiments to improve metrics). At the time, I believe the notifications team was less thoughtful about this. I think this has changed in the years since I left though, based on this blog post and what I've seen in the app.
- kbos87 4y agoIt sure took a long time and a lot of words to state the obvious. What I’d actually find interesting is an exploration of the conditions that led Facebook to its current state of notification hell, unable to see the obvious errors of its own ways for so long.
- johnny22 4y agoI'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.
- baby 4y agoThis ^. Every team wants to grow their sub app and thinks they deserve a place in the notification bar. Now imagine that this is true as well to get access to whatsapp or instagram user base. I think whatsapp has really done a good job of not bloating the app and rejecting all these requests.
- chestervonwinch 4y agoThe feed used to be a simple chronological timeline. Then it evolved into whatever stochastic mess it is now in an attempt to maximize user engagement and ad views. So they've turned the notifications into essentially a mini version of the old news feed which (big surprise) is damn noisy.
- unixlikeposting 4y agoI feel strongly that infinite scroll needs to be either illegalized or heavily regulated.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoThe infinite scroll isn't really the issue here (though I wouldn't mind a law mandating a toggle).
- criddell 4y agoI don't really use Facebook so for me Spotify is the worst for notifications. I've gone through settings and turned off all of the notification categories (and there are a lot of them). They still send me notifications, including notifications that I have notifications disabled.
- LgWoodenBadger 4y agoLinkedIn should take note. For a while it felt like they invented a new notification, opt-out of course, every few days. It was infuriating.
- Seb-C 4y agoI 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.
- WhiteBlueSkies 4y agoMZ: They trust me, dumb fucks.
- Ozzie_osman 4y agoI'm glad to see more and more of these types of results. The typical pattern for the past few years at many consumer internet companies is an A/B test, with some positive short-term metrics and no long-term validation. Any qualitative resistance to the short-term engagement metrics is dismissed, and the change is rolled put. Product managers and software engineering teams parade these metrics wins, get promoted, etc. User experience degrades one a/b test at a time, while "engagement" improves. Glad to see someone is thinking about qualitative user experience and correlating it with long-term metrics. Source: ran an engineering group at a "data driven" consumer internet company that fell victim to these tactics.
- nicbou 4y agoThere 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.
- nimbius 4y agogeneral reminder that facebook is a psycbologically damaging online presence with demonstrably predatory operational functions that ultimately serve to divide and conquer society solely at the benefit of late stage surveillance capitalism. facebook has enforced the prosecution of womens rights in america and elevated platforms of hate speech and seditious rhetoric in numerous countries. it played a quantifiable role in the january coup in the united states, and continues to promulgate american foreign policy through direct ties with the us government. facebook maintains round the clock surveillance of nearly everything you do through your phone once the app is installed, and has faced little consequence for it.
- gw67 4y agoI wonder why they are surprised that sending less notification increase satisfaction.
- pronlover723 4y agoThey'd increase usage by me if they let me tailor what I want to see. I NEVER want to see "so-and-so commented on ~~~". I never want to see "so-and-so liked ~~~". I never want to see "short" videos. But, FB doesn't let me turn them off so I get disgusted at how they are trying to shovel content at me and I stop looking. Same with Twitter (though I found tweetdeck solves much of this). Same with Instagram, trying to shovel content I didn't ask for in my face. Same with Youtube's dark pattern of trying to get you watch "Shorts" and if you close the row it says "Okay, I won't show you again for 30 days". "NO! FUCK YOU! I didn't ask you to show me again in 30 days!!" (and BTW I'm paying) Twitter does has that dark pattern as well. Delete something and it says "ok, we'll show you less of this" .. "NO! FUCK YOU. Don't show me any ever!" The result is that I barely use any of these services. Once a month or so I try again for some reason, boredom? and get pissed off and leave. Now some FB/Twitter/Youtube person will claim their metrics say that their dark patterns get people to use the service more. Ugh!
- rpastuszak 4y agoThis 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)
- shortcake27 4y ago> 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.
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- syntaxing 4y agoInterestingly, this is actually the biggest appeal of iOS to me. Been a huge android user since the beginning. Somehow iOS had way less notifications and I felt my quality of life go up.
- anshumankmr 4y agoYou know what's cooler than a thousand notifications? Zero.
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- akdor1154 4y agoWhy on earth are internal Facebook teams blogging on Medium?
- Tempest1981 4y agoTrying to win back all the upset HN users
- rqtwteye 4y agoI am starting to hate any service that constantly sends newsletters, feedback requests and other notifications. Usually it’s blatantly obvious that they are not to my benefit but only to their benefit. Facebook is bad that way, Doordash also sends me a ton of stuff that is never useful.
- w-hn 4y agoI 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.
- Yhippa 4y agoIt's funny, DoorDash notifies me in triplicate in various mediums about my order except when they cancel it and never notify me.
- twodave 4y agoIf only Instacart would follow along on this. Really annoying getting a buzz for every order I make (I do about 3 per week). And then I also have to dismiss a bunch of screens prior to the next order.
- orrymr 4y agoMaximum satisfaction == no notifications
- ARK_12 4y agoi am mind blown facebook ever thought their approach to spamming users with notifications, was anything other than self sabotage in the long run. The perception of increased app usage at the expense of satisfaction with the app, was always going to be only short term.
- sirius87 4y agoThis has been a noticeable shift, at least for me. From being bombarded with irrelevant click-bait notifications and random birthday reminders to get me to log back into the website, its now much calmer and relevant. The "increased satisfaction" is likely a result of fb going overboard with notifications a few years ago. That phase led me to set aside time one day and actually go through all of fb's privacy settings to turn off all email comms or anything that could prod me to log back into the site. I also uninstalled the mobile app and my Android phone battery thanked me for it. The best feature by far is the notification dot with the count when you're not (fully) logged-in in the browser. I only ever log in when there's really something that needs my attention. For the last couple of years, my feed is basically births, deaths, marriages - a high no. of posts are by people of a senior age, and the conversation in general just isn't relevant to me.
- bad-engineers 4y ago[flagged]