One very notable difference between Facebook circa 2010 and Facebook circa 2020 is notifications circa 2010 had a very good signal to noise ratio. Basically 100% of notifications were ones I wanted to see.<p>That also meant on many days I'd have no notifications at all. A week could go by with 0 notifications. Since the quality of notifications used to be so high, I used to treat FB notifications the same as I treat my email inbox (no email goes unseen).<p>Over time, they started jamming in "fake" notifications like "Your friend posted a new video!" whereas in the past, I'd simply have 0 notifications for the day. After that, it became impractical to keep up with the never ending notifications.<p>They need to be looking at the quality of their notifications rather than their frequency.
The notifications used to just be stuff directly applicable to you (X tagged you in a photo etc).<p>Then the demographic that advertisers really care about — affluent Americans in the 25-49 age bracket — stopped using Facebook.com every waking minute, and product managers panicked.<p>Their solution was to add more content to one of the most-clicked areas of the UI (I bet at least one product manager got a nice stock bump based on that change).<p>Short-term gains are great and all, but the change smelled of desperation, and had utterly predictable long-term effects.<p>And now we get a blog post telling us what should have been obvious to begin with.
For years there has been a big red notification dot stuck on the FB video tab reminding me that I have some large number of shitty videos to watch. I have no idea how FB decides precisely how many shitty videos it is very important that I watch. It used to be in the 40s, now it's 15. I never clicked the tab once.<p>I actually tried to figure out how to get rid of this at some point, but it definitely wasn't a priority for FB to give me control over this.<p>I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.
For a user's satisfactory, I really think any notification should be opt-in instead of opt-out for anything other than direct message.<p>Facebook's blue app is one of the first apps I had to turned off the notification entirely. If I really care about some one who just upload a photo I will go into your app to take a look. These notifications are now just baits for the ads.
I haven't been at facebook in a while, but seeing that chart at the top which shows the goal metric increase and become statistically significantly higher still makes me subconsciously very happy.<p>One thing a lot of people outside the company probably don't realize is that every team at Facebook is different and the culture of experimentation varies greatly from team to team. When I was there, the people who worked on stories ranking were very serious about user satisfaction and thought deeply about whether changes were good for the user even beyond what could be measured via metrics. I worked a tiny bit on notifications experiments at Instagram (wasn't on a team but monitored and changed some ongoing experiments to improve metrics). At the time, I believe the notifications team was less thoughtful about this. I think this has changed in the years since I left though, based on this blog post and what I've seen in the app.
I'm glad to see more and more of these types of results. The typical pattern for the past few years at many consumer internet companies is an A/B test, with some positive short-term metrics and no long-term validation. Any qualitative resistance to the short-term engagement metrics is dismissed, and the change is rolled put. Product managers and software engineering teams parade these metrics wins, get promoted, etc. User experience degrades one a/b test at a time, while "engagement" improves.<p>Glad to see someone is thinking about qualitative user experience and correlating it with long-term metrics.<p>Source: ran an engineering group at a "data driven" consumer internet company that fell victim to these tactics.
More notifications increased satisfaction by a small amount as well - when dissatisfied users like me deleted our accounts because of them. Technically, overall satisfaction increased by removing us from the survey population.
The feed used to be a simple chronological timeline. Then it evolved into whatever stochastic mess it is now in an attempt to maximize user engagement and ad views. So they've turned the notifications into essentially a mini version of the old news feed which (big surprise) is damn noisy.
First thing I do to all OSs I'm using. Disable all notifications for everything except DM from family and friends.<p>If I want to know about a new email, group message or some other random thing I'll open the app or site and take a look.<p>Otherwise leave me the ** alone.
They'd increase usage by me if they let me tailor what I want to see. I <i>NEVER</i> want to see "so-and-so commented on ~~~". I never want to see "so-and-so liked ~~~". I never want to see "short" videos. But, FB doesn't let me turn them off so I get disgusted at how they are trying to shovel content at me and I stop looking.<p>Same with Twitter (though I found tweetdeck solves much of this).<p>Same with Instagram, trying to shovel content I didn't ask for in my face.<p>Same with Youtube's dark pattern of trying to get you watch "Shorts" and if you close the row it says "Okay, I won't show you again for 30 days". "NO! FUCK YOU! I didn't ask you to show me again in 30 days!!" (and BTW I'm paying)<p>Twitter does has that dark pattern as well. Delete something and it says "ok, we'll show you less of this" .. "NO! FUCK YOU. Don't show me any ever!"<p>The result is that I barely use any of these services. Once a month or so I try again for some reason, boredom? and get pissed off and leave.<p>Now some FB/Twitter/Youtube person will claim their metrics say that their dark patterns get people to use the service more. Ugh!
This has been a noticeable shift, at least for me. From being bombarded with irrelevant click-bait notifications and random birthday reminders to get me to log back into the website, its now much calmer and relevant.<p>The "increased satisfaction" is likely a result of fb going overboard with notifications a few years ago. That phase led me to set aside time one day and actually go through all of fb's privacy settings to turn off all email comms or anything that could prod me to log back into the site. I also uninstalled the mobile app and my Android phone battery thanked me for it.<p>The best feature by far is the notification dot with the count when you're not (fully) logged-in in the browser. I only ever log in when there's <i>really</i> something that needs my attention. For the last couple of years, my feed is basically births, deaths, marriages - a high no. of posts are by people of a senior age, and the conversation in general just isn't relevant to me.
I am starting to hate any service that constantly sends newsletters, feedback requests and other notifications. Usually it’s blatantly obvious that they are not to my benefit but only to their benefit. Facebook is bad that way, Doordash also sends me a ton of stuff that is never useful.
I don't really use Facebook so for me Spotify is the worst for notifications. I've gone through settings and turned off all of the notification categories (and there are a <i>lot</i> of them).<p>They still send me notifications, including notifications that I have notifications disabled.
i am mind blown facebook ever thought their approach to spamming users with notifications, was anything other than self sabotage in the long run.<p>The perception of increased app usage at the expense of satisfaction with the app, was always going to be only short term.
It sure took a long time and a lot of words to state the obvious. What I’d actually find interesting is an exploration of the conditions that led Facebook to its current state of notification hell, unable to see the obvious errors of its own ways for so long.
If only Instacart would follow along on this. Really annoying getting a buzz for every order I make (I do about 3 per week). And then I also have to dismiss a bunch of screens prior to the next order.
Interestingly, this is actually the biggest appeal of iOS to me. Been a huge android user since the beginning. Somehow iOS had way less notifications and I felt my quality of life go up.
i find this funny, some how facebook has my phone number and keeps texting me notifications... or maybe this is an account from who ever had this phone number before?
general reminder that facebook is a psycbologically damaging online presence with demonstrably predatory operational functions that ultimately serve to divide and conquer society solely at the benefit of late stage surveillance capitalism.<p>facebook has enforced the prosecution of womens rights in america and elevated platforms of hate speech and seditious rhetoric in numerous countries.
it played a quantifiable role in the january coup in the united states, and continues to promulgate american foreign policy through direct ties with the us government.<p>facebook maintains round the clock surveillance of nearly everything you do through your phone once the app is installed, and has faced little consequence for it.
Imagine needing a data team to find out people only want notifications for the most relevant information and not be spammed for every idiocy.<p>Imagine needing to spend tens or hundreds of millions to have an answer every single user could give you for free.<p>You got to love the age of information and social media, gives so many people jobs.