Last time I was using a windows computer I was turning it off to re image it and I didn’t want to wait for it to shut down so I just held the power button since it didn’t matter if it got messed up and windows popped up this message on screen that was like “Please stop holding the power button we just need a few minutes”. Like what are you doing you aren’t supposed to tell the user what to do, that isn’t the job of a computer

all computers should be like the one in star trek TNG, for simple feedback it just beeps and bloops in ways that are intuitive, and if it actually needs to use speech to relay detailed information it does so in a short and efficient message delivered in a clearly roboticly neutral yet pleasant voice.

This is like bing AI chatbot asking a question back of its answer now

That’s what’s good about android, all apps need to ask if they can send notifications when first installed. I rarely allow it.

I too take any unwanted notification as a potential threat: the only answer is immediate annihilation of said app. Basically the dark forest hypothesis but it’s my phone.

Based
My phone my rules

Duolingo is the only exception.

… . -. -… / … . .-… .–.

Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.

Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.

I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?

See some of today’s most watched reels!

Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.

They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

(This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)

And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.

postscript

This being Lemmy, I’m going to politely ask people to leave me be with my locked down phone OS and corporate malware. Yes yes I know, the only phone really worth using has a bare metal OS, you gotta ask your relatives to resend the family photos as ascii art so you can see your niblings in the CLI, you gotta laser out your phone’s processor’s clock and replace it with a mechanical switch that you flick back and forth so you can be 100% sure the phone isn’t running when you don’t want it to. I get it, I hear you, I’m just generally content with this phone and I’ll probably get its overpriced underwhelming successor in 5 years when I need a new one. It’s fine. It’s not a PC. The only thing missing is a headphone jack really.

And handling notifications is all smart watches seem to be good for!

So then the answer is to uninstall apps that give you reminders - to negate the correlation that nagging users leads to positive outcomes.

Thanks for the reminder to delete everything I’m not using right now lol

My recommendation is Neo Store because even though it’s slow there’s still more apps available.

My experience working support for a phone manufacturer has informed me that once an average user installs an app it tends to stay installed indefinitely, but they may or may not be aware it’s even installed. A gentle nudge notification of “hey look at me” every once in a while might very well be amazing for engagement

Or maybe, and I know this sounds utterly insane but hear me out:

Instead of reminding people to use it with notifications you could use the memory of previous engagements to make the user actually initiate subsequent utilization of the app. It’s kind of like the user notificating itself.

It sounds crazy but it might work!