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Rise in 'alert fatigue' risks phone users disabling news notifications
- incomingpain 1y agoRise in "doesnt trust journalist lies" risks users disabling news.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- duxup 1y agoI've never had a news app "alert" that did anything positive for me ... never. News sites are websites I visit when I want, that's it.
- andy99 1y agoOnly a news outlet would consider disabling news notifications a risk. Obviously they risk losing views and ad revenue, there's absolutely no "risk" to the public. Personally I have all phone notifications off. There are a few I might like, but every single app abuses the privilege.
- the_plus_one 1y agoWe are similar. The only time my phone makes any noise whatsoever is if I get a phone call from someone in my contacts or a Slack ping during work hours. Everything else can wait.
- soco 1y agoNot even "contacts", but the 5 favorite contacts (and even that's only vibration). Even the work app stays on silent - if I'm working I'm around anyway so I won't miss it by much, and if it's outside hours I don't even know those folks.
- duxup 1y agoYup, my priority contacts are the only people who get through to make my phone do things audibly. Notifications beyond that is very limited.
- UtopiaPunk 1y agoI know, right? I can't imagine wanting to receive any kind of alert from a news app. If there's a real emergency, like an earthquake or tsunami warning, I believe there are alternative systems in place that will send out a special alert to phones in the area (and ideally really loud sirens outside). I'll read or listen to the news when it makes sense in my day to do so. I very much do not want to be interrupted because a national level politician did something. If it was important, it will still be important in a few hours when I go over the news.
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoI turned off all news notifications on November 4, 2024 and haven't regretted it once.
- madcaptenor 1y agoOn November 5 my wife had surgery, which meant that I had to hang out in a hospital waiting room. I did not want to have to see a TV, but there was nowhere in that room where that was an option. I ended up positioning myself near the TV that was showing college football news, because I have no rooting interests in college football and that was much easier to tune out.
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoI hope it was easy and recovery went swiftly. Election Day was my son’s second birthday and I didn’t want to be glued to my phone all day.
- Daneel_ 1y agoI’ll bite: what was on the 4th/5th of November last year?
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoAn election for president of the United States happens every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November
- Daneel_ 1y agoHuh, I didn't know the election in the US was on a specific date. Interesting.
- jasonfrost 1y agoNever had a news app so
- reaperducer 1y agoNever had a news app so Did you die in the middle of writing your sentence?
- octo888 1y agoYou might find it curious that it's a very Irish way of speaking. But less common in writing I believe. If you go to Ireland, best not to accuse them of dying if they end their sentences with "so" :-)
- SoftTalker 1y agoI have disabled absolutely everthing my phone will let me disable. I allow only my own calendar/reminders, and messages from people in my contact list. Everything else is silenced or denied.
- duxup 1y agoI think my phone is silenced 80% of its life.
- uncircle 1y agoI have to disable message notifications as well because people tend to express themselves in multiple messages, and we do not have the ability to beep once every minute or so instead of every message. And God help you if you are in a group chat. Only calls are allowed on my phone, and it’s still often just robocall spam from unknown numbers. Technology is great.
- OptionOfT 1y agoiOS 26 gained call screening, which answers calls from unknown numbers for you. It then asks the other party for name & purpose. This has essentially eliminated my spam calls.
- no_wizard 1y agoThe surprisingly obvious but not implemented improvements to mobile device platforms continues to make me question whether they really know what they’re doing or not
- r0ckarong 1y ago"Make the pry bar chocolate flavored" suggests chairman of the shoving down throat committee.
- tpl 1y agoApple should have never relaxed the guidelines they had.
- pengaru 1y agoWow, I had no idea people allow their phones to become such a nuisance in their daily lives.
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoAny breaking news that is urgent enough for an alert happens to also be something a friend would text me about. Case in point, the assassination attempt in Butler PA last year. No other “breaking news” has been relevant enough for me to reenable notifications. I check the news periodically enough as it is. That covers me wanting to know about anything interesting.
- teeray 1y agoAs soon as notifications started being (inevitably) used for advertisements, they started getting disabled on my phone. The most insidious are those that you want for order status for something like food delivery, then they get leveraged into ads a few days later ("It's Taco Tuesday! Order from your favorite Mexican restaurants!").
- MaKey 1y agoWhy would you need news notifications anyway? If something catastrophic is going on and I need to act, I'll get an alert on my phone via cell broadcast.
- reaperducer 1y agoI've always said, "If it's that important, I'll see the orange glow on the horizon." But then again, sometimes I've lived in places with chemical plants, and they seem to behave in unexpected ways rather regularly.
- LurkandComment 1y ago1) Everything beeps now. Phones, cars, machines etc. It gets a bit much and I just turn things off 2) On computers, so many notifications pop up and block elements of an interface. Popup that blocks what i'm reading. Popup that blocks system clock. Everything that piles up in bottom right. There are times where I have to close 2 things to get to the thing I want. I disable as many as I can. 3) Requests from websites about notification. I'm just about to read something and then all of a sudden i'm asked if I want to enable notifications. 4) Constantly asked to change default settings. This is not your default X, would you like to make it default X. My god. I went back to non-smart watches, physical books, I unsubscribe and turn off notifications.
- callc 1y agoGetting distracted at random times during the day _is_ fatiguing. Try putting phone away in another room when focusing on something, focus without distraction is a super power!
- kmfrk 1y agoPush notifications definitely would benefit from more granular controls. Tagging alerts like discount notifications you didn't set up as something separate for instance. I don't trust some AI classification over an explicit API. Steve Jobs once said that privacy is knowing what you sign up for. Feels like push notifications deserve the same treatment.
- joe_guy 1y agoThis is built into Android. A program like Discord has very granular controls over each type (DM, server event, stage event, etc) of notification as well as controls for each source (You can set a specific users DMs to be priority messages, silenced, show/hide from lock screen, etc). A program like Uber Eats has a bit less benefit to allowing such controls over what they send you. While they do still break down messages by type, their descriptions are a bit cryptic and after getting an unsolicited notification from it, I ended up disabling all of them.
- Zak 1y agoOne that was annoying me for a while is Turo (like AirBnB for rental cars), which had only one notification category. When I have a rental upcoming or active, I need to be notified about messages from the host, but it would also send marketing notifications on occasion, which I never want to see. I would turn off notifications manually most of the time. It looks like they recently split it into "marketing" and "transactional", which is probably good enough. The one AI thing I'd like my phone to do is reliably decide when I would like to be told about any given notification using an on-device model.
- turnsout 1y agoThe lack of self-awareness here is definitely funny—every major news outlet absolutely blasts their mobile apps with an endless stream of breathless breaking updates. I turned all news notifications off entirely in 2016.
- darth_avocado 1y ago> A research tool used to monitor news alerts found that the New York Times averaged 10 a day, Tagesschau in Germany averaged 1.9, NDTV in India sent 29.1, while BBC News averaged 8.3 a day. I’m sorry but in an environment where everyone requires you to install a separate app, is it really acceptable to send 10 notifications a day? Just a single notification a day per app would end up resulting in 40-50 notifications for a user.
- Zak 1y ago> everyone requires you to install a separate app Most of these news outlet can be accessed from a single app: a web browser of your choice. I find that's a better experience anyway; it's easier to block ads and annoyances.
- reaperducer 1y agoI was in Texas earlier this year and there was a big hullabaloo over some lone dispatcher in some tiny flyspeck town in some rural county that sent out an alert to every single phone in the state. Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away. My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep! But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.† †This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.
- exsomet 1y agoAlso in Texas - I got this same alert and, (seemingly) like every else in the state I now have emergency alerts turned off. Which is bad. The other example that comes to mind is, I was in Toronto a few years back and got a “Nuclear incident emergency alert” stating that there was NO problem at the nearby power plant and NO abnormal release of radiation. Equally uninformative, hugely more alarming (and relevant).
- rdtsc 1y ago> Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week Having constant news alerts sounds like a sure away to live in perpetual state of anxiety and live in whatever "manufactured consent" bubble that news outlet is pedaling. It's hard to believe people do that to themselves. But, again people engage in self-destructive behaviors, so overall it's not surprising if we think that at level. > “If they send too many, people uninstall the app, which is obviously a disaster. Is it a disaster? I'd call that a win for people! Maybe the answer is to trick these news app to drastically increase their notification rate, to nudge people to uninstall them? /s
- awinter-py 1y agorisks
- _fat_santa 1y agoOne thing I've noticed apps doing is they will now build native looking notification request popups. When you open the app you will see a window that looks just like the iOS notification window asking if you want to show notifications, if you click yes then you get the "official" notifications window. They do this because if you click no on the "official" window, Apple will not let the app request notifications again, but if you click no on the app's version, they can keep asking you again and again. IMHO Apple needs to start cracking down on these shady notification UI's
- valenterry 1y agoNo, Apple should have three options Yes, No, Never ask again. Like every other software with good UX.
- nottorp 1y agoI think "No" means "Never ask again" in Apple land. But that doesn't prevent the app from having custom in-app dialogs about it. What are they supposed to do, use "AI" to censor them?
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago> But that doesn't prevent the app from having custom in-app dialogs about it. What are they supposed to do, use "AI" to censor them? Can't Apple enforce it by store policy?
- nottorp 1y ago> Can't Apple enforce it by store policy? Not sure. For one they're already famous for their reviews being ... random. For two, a spammer could just give Apple an account to test with for which the custom popups don't show.
- Zak 1y agoI only want immediate notifications for messages from people I know, or dangerous situations in proximity to my location. I have never once wanted my phone to buzz to tell me about general breaking news. What would be useful is to be able to set up my phone to keep low-priority notifications in a digest for later viewing with a buzz and an icon at set times of the day if there's anything in there.
- getnormality 1y agoIf I get so much as one unsolicited alert from an app, I disable notifications on it immediately. I've been doing this from the very first days I had a smartphone, in 2013 or so. My reserves of attention are limited and extremely important for accomplishing my own goals. Nobody gets to draw from the reservoir without my consent if I can help it. And thank goodness tech still lets me help it! I just have to pray that nobody figures out how many hundreds of billions of dollars Google or Apple need to be paid to make it impossible for me to silence notifications.
- swagasaurus-rex 1y agoAny notification that doesn't originate from a human being or an action taken by a human being means the app's notification privileges are gone
- bjelkeman-again 1y agoSMS (and equivalent direct messages,I hardly get any spam), missed calls, parking reminders and a few things from my car. The rest is blocked.
- nottorp 1y ago> If I get so much as one unsolicited alert from an app, I disable notifications on it immediately. But... iOS apps ask for permission to send notifications on first run. Just deny it then.
- benterix 1y agoI went a step further and set on permanent do not disturb mode with the only exceptions for the contacts defined in "close family" group and my alarm clock. Everything else is blocked by default and has to wait for the time slot I allocated to it.
- ryandvm 1y agoLife is going to improve dramatically when we start seeing class action lawsuits for "theft of attention". If attention has economic value AND if it is limited in supply, then taking it from a person without their consent is a form of theft.
- k__ 1y agoPeople are enabling alerts?!
- 28304283409234 1y agoDear Guardian, we have sirens in the streets for 'news too important to miss'. Any, ANY other news is very very missable. Kindly get out of your bubble. Sincerely, a paying customer.
- exsomet 1y agoDon’t give people ideas, or we’ll start getting 8am morning news sirens.
- cvoss 1y agoBad behavior risks being punished for bad behavior. Nothing to see here. My news app is my browser. It gives me unified access to all (free) news outlets, of which there is an abundance. It also has a killer feature where it doesn't even offer to send notifications.
- yodon 1y agoLinkedIn recently lost the ability push info to my phone. It's gotten WAAAY too noisy and spammy. So much happier now with it disabled.
- jsbisviewtiful 1y agoApps like DoorDash and Uber have notifications turned off on my device. They bypass most notification settings Apple offers and within the app you can't turn off certain notification types... so completely turned off.