
The tyranny of messaging and notifications - Osiris30
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/6/12102874/walt-mossberg-messaging-notifications
======
jasonkester
It amazes me that neither iOS nor Android have an option for "Disallow all
notifications from all apps" or "Opt out of notifications when installing
apps". Every app I install immediately starts blasting me with notifications,
and I have to go in and turn it off for that specific app. It makes no sense.

My phone should be allowed to make noise if and only if a phone call is coming
in from somebody I know. I don't mind if it shows a count of email messages on
the lock screen, so long as it doesn't attempt to distract me from what I'm
doing to point them out. And that's it. No other notifications of any form.

I see people with things like Slack and IM binging away at them all day long,
and I just can't fathom how they get anything done. It just needs turning off.

~~~
saurik
Why even allow phone calls to interrupt you? I am serious: the world is a much
more relaxing place when the only moments something can interrupt you are the
ones where you purposely decide "this is a good moment" and look at your phone
to see if anything happened. I have been operating without audible or tactile
notifications of any form now for years. The only time my phone makes noise is
when I have an alarm set to wake me up in the morning.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Personally, I treat phone calls as important. So that, and text messages, are
two notifications I don't disable. If e.g. my family needs to reach me about
something ASAP, they know they can use this path.

That said, I tend to teach everyone around me that phone calls are for
_important_ stuff. That is, I simply don't pick up if I don't feel like it,
unless I'm suspecting the call may be about something very important. I'm
tired of people thinking I'm available 24/7 for random irrelevant stuff. I
don't have much guilt about not picking up, because if something is really
important, the caller can always tell me so via text message, and then I'll
usually call back.

~~~
dredmorbius
Phone calls are important _if and only if you can determine who it is who can
activate the ringer_.

I'm sorry, but "Dave from Microsoft Support", or "Carol from Card Services",
or the misdialed number in some language whose geographical locus is at the
antipodes, Isn't. Fucking. Important.

Yes, if you've got a family, wife, children, parents, boss, best friends,
whitelist them. Is that really more than a dozen, tops, two dozen sources?

Every. Fucking. Thing. Else. Can. Wait.

Most of it can die in a fire.

The telephone as it exists (POTS/Wired, mobile) is an absolute abomination.

------
kneel
My personal remedy

If I ever get a notification on my phone that isn't a human trying to interact
with me I immediately disable the notification and/or app.

With email I often (daily) unsubscribe from whatever impersonal newsletter
shows up in my inbox.

I save my attention for people who take time to message me personally. Red
badges on my phone are irritating.

~~~
slazaro
I go even further with email: Every email I get, if getting instantly notified
by it and interrupting me is not necessary, I later add a filter for archiving
it. Then, my inbox is for things to deal with soon, archived mails are for
other stuff. Now I only get notified by actual important stuff, or unknown
senders.

~~~
dredmorbius
A whitelist, blacklist, greylist solution works well for this, possibly with
the addition of a "backlist".

Whitelist: Inbox. High-priority senders.

Blacklist: Trash / treat as spam. One model is to add an address to your
blacklist _as you unsubscribe it_. Any further messages feed spam filters.

Greylist: Previously unseen. This goes to a bucket for sorting through. You
can apply more heuristics to this (keyword / sender / references, etc.).

Backlist: Known low-priority senders. It basically goes into the "deal with it
later" file.

Anything that's specifically sortable (e.g., technical mailing lists) goes to
its own space.

My fundamental problem is that few tools offer the means to do this type of
sorting.

Gmail's filters are, the more I use them, increasingly pathetic.

Procmail is powerful -- I've built up highly extensive filters with it over
decades. But it's also a pain to use, largely unmaintained and unmaintainable.
It lacks a simple means to, say, point at a list of addresses and say "good,
bad, or ugly". Adding addresses specifically to rulesets is somewhat tedious.
And as with other cleint-side tools, it doesn't work with IMAP services in a
reasonable way (you can treat IMAP as POP, but then you lose filtering for all
other clients accessing the server).

There are some other tools -- there's a ... Perl? based tool, Mail<mumble>,
which is cleaner than procmail but also different and I've not wrapped my head
around it. There are IMAP-based tools, but I've had little luck with them.

Email's generally simply getting crufty. I've resisted calling for a
replacement for a while, but increasingly, it's time.

------
tonylemesmer
My personal remedy

Yesterday I fired up a Nokia 6310i as my main phone and put my SIM card in it.
I setup a Zapier zap to SMS me when I get an important email (as defined by
Gmail filters). I've now realised how FEW important emails I get but how often
I used to get mail notifications (a lot).

Now my data apps on the smartphone only have access to Wi-Fi resulting in far
fewer notifications. My notification settings are already quite restrictive on
all apps.

Notifications and messaging are governed by a 2-way awareness. If people know
you are contactable (e.g. by watching the little blue tick in Whatsapp) then
they'll contact you more and spend more time checking to see if you've read
their message. If they know it takes 10 hours for you to respond then can
choose their channel more appropriately.

I've not yet had to use Google Maps for navigation (requires data) - lets see
how that turns out on my next long distance car trip.

Pain in the arse that I am now carrying 2 phones, but lets see how my
experiment pans out. Might be a total car crash (figuratively speaking)

~~~
emilburzo
Why not just uninstall everything except Gmail from your phone?

Bonus: your battery will last longer.

I like to keep the two worlds apart, if I'm at my computer I am reachable by
any means of digital communication.

If I'm not, I only have gmail on my phone (with a lot of filters so that only
time sensitive stuff reaches my actual inbox, the rest is filed away under
labels for later review).

I tried having some chat apps on my phone, but I had way too many
interruptions from whatever I was doing, and I wouldn't have been able to
respond with a coherent message anyway.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.

~~~
tonylemesmer
I guess its because for chatting with my wife (when we're in separate places I
might add!), friends and occasional work project stuff Whatsapp is great to
have. Email is clunky and sending attachments for ephemeral but important
stuff is inelegant.

Twitter DMs are no better than SMS except that you can compartmentalise those
users by not giving them your phone number.

I've never had Facebook messenger or the Facebook app and I've recently
deleted my Facebook account entirely.

SMS, email, Twitter DMs, Whatsapp and telephone are my limit but trying to
pare this down further without losing some of the utility I infrequently
enjoy.

In the mid 90s I was in my late teens when I got my first candybar phone. The
sparkly lights of smartphones for the last 10 years have now lost their shine.
I guess I'm nostalgic for the good old days of SMS and phone only whilst I'm
away from the office.

------
mafribe
I don't understand the handwringing over too many messaging systems and their
notifications.

The smartphone is the messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically
mediated communication. Whether you get 7 notifications from different 7 apps
or 7 notifications from 1 app should not make a difference from the point of
view of attention spent, focus lost, time wasted.

The following communication pattern has emerged for me, without any design on
my side:

Snap: frivolous and fun

Whatsapp: family, European friends, the Toyota/VW of messaging

LINE: Asian friends

Skype: high priority work stuff

Email: low priority work stuff

Insta: friends boasting about their life ;)

In other words, different apps function as a way of categorising messages. I
find this siloing convenient. Siloing reduces the risk of sharing the wrong
kind of message with the wrong kind of person, which has been a great problem
with unified messaging systems (e.g. Facebook, or Google's centralisation of
all accounts when they introduced G+).

As these different messaging systems are (simplifying a bit) fungible, and it
is near frictionless to switch between them on a modern smartphone, the phone
(it's number or IMEI) is the new dominant form of electronically addressable
social identity. This should worry the Facebooks, Snapchats, Whatsapps etc of
this world, because the network effects which is the driving force behind
their business models has been weakened to a considerable degree.

In summary: I welcome the widespread use of heterogeneous messaging and
notification apps on the phone, it makes my life easier and safer.

~~~
TeMPOraL
As a "messaging centre where we coordinate our electronically mediated
communication" a smartphone would be infinitely more useful if there was _one_
app for all that communication. Keeping track of which people you communicate
over which app, which conversations happened where, not to mention with huge
interface and functionality differences (e.g. you can search e-mail for old
conversations, you can _barely_ do some rudimentary searches on Facebook
Messenger (at least through the desktop web interface), but I don't believe
you can do that at all on e.g. Instagram or Snapchat) and close to zero
interoperability - this all creates a big and unnecessary cognitive load, and
is very suboptimal.

Call me spoiled, but I think modern OSes - not just mobile, but desktop too -
force way too little in terms of UX. That's why on my computers I like to
route everything text-related through Emacs. That joke about it being an
"operating system" is actually a compliment. It gives you a very big set of
operations that are consistent for all tasks that involve any kind of text.

But barring Emacs-OS for mobile phones, I'd settle for a decent dashboard that
could efficiently summarize _all_ messaging channels in one place, and allow
easy interop between them.

~~~
CPLX
One could make a reasonable argument that the smartphone is the "one app" of
which you speak.

~~~
mafribe
Exactly.

And the phone number and/or the IMEI is the technological identifier that ties
all our identities together.

~~~
dredmorbius
Multi-SIM phones.

Non-SIM (Wifi-only) phones.

Multiple phone-users.

There is no universal identifier. I may absolutely insist there isn't. And I
strongly suspect phone tech (number-based dialing) is on its way out. For all
the reasons Mossberg states, the one app I hate most is the phone, and I don't
have one. Haven't for years. There are phones by which I can occasionally be
reached. There's a mobile phone which occasionally has service. Both are
highly deprecated.

~~~
mafribe
I'm not sure I understand your point. You are referring to rare edge cases
that don't invalidate the general point.

~~~
dredmorbius
They aren't rare edge cases.

Assumptions about identity tend to fail. Perversely. Badly.

~~~
mafribe
Yes, absolute assumptions about identity fail badly, as you correctly point
out. My point is different: for most people the combo of phone number/IMEI and
the phone as physical token is the de-facto electronically addressable social
identity. All major social networks are based on this empirically observable
fact.

Those for whom phone/phone number/IMEI is not enough might encounter problems
with the current state of social networking.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Those for whom phone /phone number/IMEI is not enough might encounter
> problems with the current state of social networking._

They do, and they cope. It's not that it is mathematically impossible to share
a smartphone.

Think of poorer families that have one mobile per household. Think of I-dont-
know-what-kind-of-thinking-leads-to-that families that use a shared e-mail (or
even Facebook) account. Hell, think of my younger sister who for some time
borrowed smartphone from my mom, because she didn't have one but wanted to
check Facebook / Instagram / whatever regularly.

One device per person & one account per person is not universal when you start
looking outside of tech-inclined people and their immediate families. Sure
this assumption probably holds for _most_ people, but I'd wager that the
"most" here means something like 60-80%, and not 99.999%.

~~~
mafribe
Nothing in social will ever be 99.999%, so what?

60-80% is enough for the network effect to overcome everything else, and for
the phone/IMEI to become the de-facto standard. Just like TCP/IP/Ethernet/Wifi
became the networking de-facto standard despite other networking protocols
existing (and being superior in some dimensions like ATM). The remaining
20-40% will adapt. Some of them will not have their needs met. The world moves
on.

The interesting question is: what does the new fungibility of social software
mean for the lock-in-based business model of the likes of Twitter/Facebook
etc? How will they regain lock-in? Will they be able to add non-fungible
features, like e.g. WeChat, or will they whither?

------
kirkdouglas
Currently I have 6 messaging apps and no hope that I can reduce their number,
because I text with different groups of people. The only way to manage this is
through self-discipline - I don't check phone too often. But situation is bad,
since these 6 apps doing exactly the same job and there's no interoperability
between them.

------
Aoyagi
Orrrr what about selfcontrol? The only notifications I get on my smartphone
are system notifications, SMS, and Telegram (and that's only when I
intentionally go online, otherwise I leave the device off-line).

~~~
dredmorbius
"Self control" costs mental energy, it imposes cognitive load.

If you want to go on a diet, don't exercise self control by not opening the
bag of Oreos. Throw the fucking bag of Oreos and don't buy any more.

Practicing diet hygiene by only buying healthy foods is far easier than trying
to avoid eating crap that's in front of your face.

Practicing security hygiene by eliminating situations which give rise to
security risks (e.g., buffer overflows, and OpenBSD's rewrite of core
libraries to that effect) is far easier than trying to remember to check your
string lengths on every operation.

Practicing mental hygiene by eliminating _the very possibility_ of
interruption is vastly easier than reminding yourself to resist Every. Single.
Fucking. Temptation. That. Comes. Along.

See Daniel Kahneman's _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ , first chapter or so. Covers
this well.

~~~
Aoyagi
I'm aware of that. Hence what I said earlier. I don't get, for example,
Facebook notifications because I don't have Facebook on my device. Or anything
else that I know could cause "tyranny of notifications". I mean, it basically
is not buying the Oreos.

But unlike Oreos, applications on modern smartphones are much easier to obtain
and a lot of people still believe something along the lines of "more 'apps',
more productivity", so you have to pull out arguably more effort. Regardless,
people are to blame themselves in both cases.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thinking back over my experience:

Tablet, wifi only, no phone.

Very few social aps, and reducing those.

Ditto messaging.

Google's crap is installed and cannot be removed, though some apps can be
disabled.

I'm routinely queried by websites whether I'll allow location data. No, I
won't. That's disabled at device level, and I should never be queried for
that. Ever.

Somehow, Google Hangouts got itself convinced I was logged in. I'm not. Got
some random connects. Backed out and blocked the shit out of as much of that
as possible.

Google Maps pestered me for location information every fucking time. No,
that's not how I used this app, and I'm not going to provide it. Finally
uninstalled/disabled the app.

YouTube running pre-roll ads. Finally disabled that.

Google Play Store wanted to give me games. I walked through disabling and
ripping out as much of that as I could. I think some of it's been walked back.

Google Chrome browser: autoplay video, audio, popover crap, and no adblock.
I'm about ready to uninstall / block _it_.

Various other nags, including "application optimisation" from Android itself.
Really, just fucking figure out how to fucking optimise yourself and leave me
the fuck out of it.

I use this device for research, some writing, and some online posting. That's
pretty much it. It still bugs the fucking crap out of me and is shit for what
it does.

I'm relatively convinced this is the last full-on Android device I'll buy.
It's been semi-useful, but frustrating as fuck, a privacy nightmare, the
tablet itself is locked down pretty hard, and the keyboard-case from Logitech
was defective from purchase and now Logitech are refusing to replace it with
same -- I'd need a case, stand, and keyboard to replace it, they're offering
at best a keyboard. Lawsuit and consumer complaint time.

Pretty much a clusterfuck all around.

~~~
Aoyagi
Wow. I've only used Android for testing, never for real world use, and what
you say almost makes me glad I'm stuck with Windows 10 Mobile (well, or WP8).
Or to go with Cyanogenmod as soon as I switch.

~~~
dredmorbius
The best antidote for Google love and trust is using Google products and
tools.

------
exodust
Notifications can be turned off per app or completely. The author complains
about Starbucks notifications as if he is helpless to stop the onslaught.

Just take control of your devices rather than leaving everything at default
settings. Go on... embark on an adventurous mission into the settings and
flick a few switches like a boss.

------
yann63
This is because most apps designers want you to spend time in their apps.
Instead they should focus do design for time well spent:
[http://timewellspent.io/](http://timewellspent.io/)

Great article published here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11737232)

------
dredmorbius
I hear Mossberg's message loud and clear, agree with virtually all of it, and
hate the present world. He's got the journalistic and tech cred to be heard,
and I very much hope he is.

A unified, centralised, _USER-CENTRIC_ message-and-notifications-control
interface would be wonderful. Android absolutely isn't it. iOS, from comments
here, might have some advantages.

I've hurled my phone and carry a WiFi-only tablet. Mostly I've the luxury of
_not_ requiring to be in instant and continuous contact, and it's a godsend.

Looking over Mossberg's data, I'm impressed by his 350 emails/day stat. It's
quite close to what Stephen Wolfram reported in his quantified self reveal,
and hints strongly at an upper-bound to the number of interruptions and
notifications people can tolerate. If Mossberg devotes 2 hours daily to email,
he's dealing with three a minute -- one every 20 seconds. If he's devoting 4
minutes to each message, he's spending 23 hours 20 minutes _of every day_
processing email. Clearly, at that volume, there are limits to either how many
messages can be processed, how much processing can be given each, or both.

Wolfram's observation was that _not_ responding immediately to email tended to
be a win for him, as many problems self-resolved.

Another hacker trick has long been to download and process entire email
spools. RMS does this, @kragen on HN does (or did) as well -- literally
pulling an mbox file, and going through and responding to it, with a batch-
send later. Marissa Meyer of Yahoo is reported to use Mutt to blast through
hundreds of emails in a late-night, multi-hour session, something I've done
(or did, when my email spool was still tractable).

[http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/](http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/)

------
droopyEyelids
I believe this may only be a problem for certain generations.

People raised to be "native" with technology have several filters.

First, they realize managing notifications is highly important. They
ruthlessly unsubscribe, block and restrict.

Second, different uses are compartmentalized between different services and
those services are given different abilites to penetrate your attention. You
don't get work snapchats. Slack has a snooze mode and you don't set up your
mobile notification center to keep them around until dismissed.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, they aren't compelled to jump at every
attempt to contact them. Messages can go unanswered, and life goes on.

~~~
johnchristopher
Damn kids know how to work the VCR !

Seriously, many digital natives are as clueless as anyone else regarding their
smartphone and, more broadly, regarding computers as well.

~~~
sheraz
Yup. Step outside your personal and professional tech-bubbles, and it becomes
apparent how many people young and old know almost nothing about their phones
and computers.

Pareto's rule at work -- 80% of smartphone users only use 20% of the features.
And unfortunately, those features to tweak and control notifications live in
the often unused 80% of the phone.

------
franciscop
> "Notifications are supposed to save you time"

That's a big premise that I didn't know nor I believe it's true. Notifications
are supposed to tell you when something happens, which is the opposite of
saving you time.

~~~
adiabatty
Beats manually polling apps yourself to see if there's anything new in each.

~~~
franciscop
Not so sure, half of the apps that notify me I would have never polled them
(maps, dictionaries, studying apps).

The other half are muted so I can poll them when I'm not in the middle of a
focused task as that would break my concentration and I'd need a while to
regain it.

The only two I keep active and not blocked are slack and Inbox, both having
low traffic for me, because I use them for important work-related stuff.

------
cel1ne
There's a gesture I often find myself doing while working:

1\. Turn phone silent and flip it screen-down

2\. Quit Mail.app

3\. Zoom in (MacOS) about 10%, so I can't see the border of my screen, with
the menubar, the notifications in the dock etc.

~~~
Razengan
Re: 3, you can just hide the menubar and the dock. They only show up on
mouseover and it's actually quite pleasant as well as frees up some screen
real estate on laptops.

~~~
amelius
But if the menubar/dock don't show notifications in that case, then that is a
bug, it seems. Not all people will think that is a feature.

~~~
Swizec
You can explicitly disable notifications. It's very nice.

I just wish it extended to browser notifications. They're increasngly becoming
a problem.

------
ekzy
One of the "big solution":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88Ya9krtBk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88Ya9krtBk)

------
tkjef
I made a pretty nice Android app to manage your email & text notifications.
Check it out here:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.org.imsono.emailnew&hl=en)

Let me know if you have any questions. Been working great for me for 4+ years.

------
EGreg
Ideally, notifications should only be for things you are interested in, ie
things that accumulate a high enough score based on your filters. Filters
should include the subjects and the label of the contacts that posted it.

------
glasz
i'm quite amazed by how much of a problem this is for people. they seem to be
subscribed to all kinds of useless crap and/or unable to just configure their
shit properly.

the most i get are 3 notifications per week. 90% of them are crap which i
could even disable.

and even then i mostly ignore them.

what happened to human's ability to ignore things? notifications are not like
robots chasing you.

------
pepijndevos
BlackBerry's Hub is your friend.

~~~
richardboegli
Or potentially Samsung Focus

[http://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-7-Edge-
Unpa...](http://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-7-Edge-Unpacked-
event-coming-August-2.167755.0.html)

This is why I want to buy Note 7.... Samsung could include an app called the
Samsung Focus for combining email, instant messaging, and calendar into one
convenient window.

------
mxuribe
I wish I could upvote this more than once...this article - and associated -
issue struck such a chord with me!

