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My elderly in-laws have lept at the chance to get rid of landlines, only to be replaced by near constant WeChat or iMessage pings. It was this at this point tha

My elderly in-laws have lept at the chance to get rid of landlines, only to be replaced by near constant WeChat or iMessage pings. It was this at this point that I discovered that they’re not alone and most people live with near constant mobile notification bombardment, putting almost zero effort in taming it. It took me a while to condition them to use the silence slider which they were barely aware of. Then it made me wonder if messenger apps were actually an improvement. Landlines had the advantage of being completely out of mind when you’re away from home.

dymk 3y ago
Mobile phones & modern notification systems are strictly better in terms of flexibility. As you said, you can silence all notifications for arbitrary periods of time and schedule quiet times, but if you need you can still access them any time you want. Landlines' async notification channel is limited to a voicemail, which... well, it sucks.
- SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
  Definitely agree there, I’m not proposing going back to landlines or any variation. That said, I feel like the fact that just about any app you install signs you for all the notifications all the time is a bit of a dark pattern.
  - dymk 3y ago
    Totally agree with that, the first time an app sends me an ad/nag disguised as a notification, it gets blackholed. Related, I really like the notification summary feature of iOS - it delays showing you a notification and rolls all them up into a summary every (configurable) N hours. You can exclude priority apps e.g. a messenger you know you want realtime notifs from.
jemmyw 3y ago
I was sitting at a table at a sports club the other day where a young fella had put down his phone. It lit up and I saw a terrifying stack of notifications, 20+ messages per app, more apps than space on the lock screen. If I get one then I read it and it I get too many that I don't read then I stop them because they're clearly about something I'm better off reading at my leisure rather than being alerted.
- dharmab 3y ago
  My iPhone looks like that because you have to manually interact with or swipe to clear notifications to remove them from the stack. And usually I get all the information I need by looking at the preview. I recommend turning off most notifications in the settings except the ones you absolutely need for your work and family. iOS has a pretty good level of granularity.

dymk 3y ago

Mobile phones & modern notification systems are strictly better in terms of flexibility. As you said, you can silence all notifications for arbitrary periods of time and schedule quiet times, but if you need you can still access them any time you want. Landlines' async notification channel is limited to a voicemail, which... well, it sucks.

SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
Definitely agree there, I’m not proposing going back to landlines or any variation. That said, I feel like the fact that just about any app you install signs you for all the notifications all the time is a bit of a dark pattern.
- dymk 3y ago
  Totally agree with that, the first time an app sends me an ad/nag disguised as a notification, it gets blackholed. Related, I really like the notification summary feature of iOS - it delays showing you a notification and rolls all them up into a summary every (configurable) N hours. You can exclude priority apps e.g. a messenger you know you want realtime notifs from.

jemmyw 3y ago

I was sitting at a table at a sports club the other day where a young fella had put down his phone. It lit up and I saw a terrifying stack of notifications, 20+ messages per app, more apps than space on the lock screen. If I get one then I read it and it I get too many that I don't read then I stop them because they're clearly about something I'm better off reading at my leisure rather than being alerted.

dharmab 3y ago
My iPhone looks like that because you have to manually interact with or swipe to clear notifications to remove them from the stack. And usually I get all the information I need by looking at the preview. I recommend turning off most notifications in the settings except the ones you absolutely need for your work and family. iOS has a pretty good level of granularity.