A Common Sense Media report finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours. What does that do to their brains?
3 points
I prefer to give them a chance first. As soon as an app abuses that privilege, the permission to show notifications gets instantly revoked.
If it’s a somewhat useful notification, but I don’t need to read it right now, it gets scheduled and I’ll read that in the afternoon if I feel like it. If it’s a serious offense like spamming, then that right is gone forever. The app may also get a negative review as result.
Now that I look at my notification settings, I can easily identify three groups:
- Serious apps that never send me anything, or if they do, it’s actually something I need to know. There are surprisingly many apps like this.
- Semi-serious apps that send notifications a bit too frequently and they aren’t really that important anyway. These get scheduled. If I ignore the notifications for a week, nothing bad will happen.
- Back-stabbing cannibalistic monetary predator apps. They send nothing but trash and land mines, and they do it all the time. Their business model is usually based on manipulation, misdirection, deception and straight up lies. They try to trick you into clicking some stuff and then rely on you forgetting to cancel the subscription later. I don’t have many apps like this, but all of their notifications are forever blocked. If you have a lot of this cancer of the app store type of garbage, I can totally understand why all notifications are blocked for all apps.
