Linked – App notifications are tricking you to click by exaggerating numbers in your alert badges
Look, everyone knows that when you see a notification on your phone, curiosity is going to kick in, that’s why many of us change the default settings to only alerting us to the things that are really important, of course that just means they’ll keep changing the game: I know I’m constantly finding myself with notifications that didn’t exist before, especially suggestions to boost my page posts with an ad on Facebook.
“Today’s apps are now using notifications to ping you as many times as possible and even exaggerating the notification counts in the little red badges in iOS and the latest versions of Android. Many apps will find any reason possible to alert you and use anything it can find to inflate the numbers in the badges to get you to re-engage with the app. You’d think that it would desensitize people to alerts, but psychologically people crave the engagement on some level.”
The only true way to disengage is to either turn off notifications completely for the app (relatively easy to do on the iPhone, app by app) or just not pick up the phone at all for a length of time. If you can’t sit and have a conversation with someone without responding to notifications, that’d be a good chance to turn the phone off completely, or keep it out of sight.
Social Media companies know you, they know what you respond to, and they want to keep giving you that. If you don’t take control, you cede it to them.
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