Manufacturing Notifications

I get notifications about the most useless, unhelpful, vapid things on LinkedIn and Facebook, read it’s a thing on TikTok too, and guess Instagram, already notifying selectively of its features like broadcast channels and Threads, has new avenues to further occupy your attention in, isn’t too far away.

Social media platforms, desperate to stay relevant, manufacture notifications to retain your attention or bring you back. For them, it’s become an exercise in coming up with new, trivial schemes that bait attention.

The level of unnecessary notification-manufacture seems to be moderately positively correlational to how well a social media platform fares in attention-seeking.

Their perspective is intermittent rewards, like irrelevant notifications, can create habitual behaviour, increasing net time spent on apps. The link between volume of notifications, damn the irrelevancy, insignificance, and quality, and user spend-time on the app can be empirically demonstrated so it makes sense for them to do that though the average user, I imagine, is more annoyed and overwhelmed by the user experience in comparison to, say, in 2016, before they bulk-shoved shit down your throat.

The increasingly diverging user experience quality and quantity is a testament to the desperation of social media companies. However, increase in quantity leads to more engagement, which also encourages others’, and profits than does increase in quality.

A study by Leanplum (2017) found that sending push notifications increases app open rates by 9.6 times, and personalised notifications increase open rates by 800%. Clevertap found that social media push notifications increase retention rates by 20%, suggesting that they help keep users engaged with the platform. The range across the studies is wide but the point is that notifications work, net.

Statista (2023) showed that average daily time spent on social media increased to 2 hours and 31 minutes globally, up from 1 hour and 30 minutes in 2012. This is how it’s changed over years:

Part of this increase can be attributed to the constant flow of notifications, which keep pulling users back to the platform. Other reasons are rise of mobile use, new and engaging formats of content (short videos, livestream), personalisation of feed and its lateral expansion to show posts you may like from pages you don’t follow, users’ desire to stay connected, amplified by and during Covid, and robuster recommendation algorithms empowered by more data on users and developments in computational capacity and AI algorithms.

On the flip-side, there are data showcasing users’ push-back to this notification-onslaught. A 2016 survey by Localytics found that 46% of app users who receive more than 5 notifications per week disable push notifications, and 32% reported that irrelevant notifications made them less likely to use the app. Clevertap’s 2020 report showed that a significant portion of app uninstalls (up to 30%) can be directly linked to feeling overwhelmed by excessive or irrelevant notifications.

Social media serves as a pacifier for adults looking to suck away their boredom and loneliness. There are no alternatives for social media so Meta can justify over-manufacture of notifications and users can tolerate them. Over-notification is annoying and overwhelming but it’s all justified as the users have nowhere to go.

After empowering attention-retainment with useless notifications and features no one asked for, IG and the like, to Meta’s credit, have implemented features such as time spent limits or Instagram’s “You’re all caught up” feature. However, paradoxically, though in line with Meta’s greed for user attention, data, and money, you will see more posts from people you don’t follow in your feed deeming the time restriction features counter-productive and to only look good.

Notifications become less instinctively exciting and lose their alertness-inducing-valor as you know that when you tap the bell icon, you’d see a comment from someone who is 2 degrees-separated on LinkedIn. You click on ‘Notifications’ now knowing that someone didn’t poke you and knowing it’s going to be a desperate pile of irrelevancies.

Since there is much less reward in biting a notification, it’s become meaningless and serves as an increasingly transitory and sometimes value-subtractive part of the social media scroll act.