Facebook's Desperate, Spammy Notifications Are Driving Us Nuts
Have you decamped for the other products under the Zuckerberg umbrella, hoping to escape Facebook's spam-like, almost totally irrelevant notifications? Well, you're more proactive than most of Digg's editors — and, of course, since Zuckerberg plans to smush the messaging tools in Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram together over the next year or so, your days of bliss with only the important notifications are probably numbered.
Unless you're a dedicated user who actively posts on Facebook and keeps up with the posts of others, you probably have strong opinions on those notifications that transparently only exist to get you to open the app. Given the amount of truly awful stuff Facebook does and inadvertently enables, you might rank "too many notifications" low on the company's list of evils. Facebook, though, really shouldn't: annoy enough people and they could drive away more users than any security issue or morally repugnant business decision would manage to.
What I and my fellow Digg editors realized in a meeting where we shared our respective gripes is that no two stories about annoying notifications are exactly alike. Naturally, we each have our own likes and dislikes — one person might kinda like knowing that today is Darryl's birthday, even though they haven't talked to Darryl since high school grad night and haven't thought about Darryl for nearly as long.
Since Facebook serves everything to us based on the data we serve it, a person's singular experience of notification fatigue may say more about them than you'd initially think. Maybe you'll recognize your own frustrations in one of our stories.
Dan
Joined Facebook in: 2006 at age 15
Number of friends: 658
Number of emails received from Facebook in 2018: 179
Number of unread notifications in the last 4 weeks: 33
Number of actually relevant notifications: 4Open the Facebook app/page: once a week
I haven't really used Facebook in years. My Facebook account remains in existence for one reason: I need it to manage Digg's Facebook page. I end up opening my own newsfeed, usually by accident, about once a week. I don't linger long.
And yet, despite years of solid non-use, my Facebook notifications never slow down. Every time I open up the site, I have ten or more new notifications waiting for me. And roughly one out of every ten of those notifications is directly related to me — someone tagged me in a photo, or invited me to an event, that sort of thing.
Facebook also sent me more than three notification emails per week in 2018. Out of the last 100 emails they've sent, three (I counted) have contained a notification that's directly related to me. The other 97? Friends posting photos (that I was not in), friends posting status updates, friends commenting on other friends' status updates (still no mention of me here), "new friend suggestions" for people I've never met. It's nuts! If you're going to barge into my inbox, at least deliver something vaguely useful, Facebook.
I can see where Facebook is coming from — people are using Facebook less and the site is desperate to turn that trend around, doing whatever it can to get you back on Facebook.com. But at this point, Facebook is the boy who cried "notification!" When I do open up Facebook, I rarely click on my notifications tab, because I know it's going to be spam. I've missed a few legit notifications because of this — notifications that I realize, upon seeing them weeks later, would have made me more likely to engage!
I don't know if Facebook has or wants a way out of this spiral, but I don't plan on checking my notifications any time soon.
BJ Pang-Chieh
Joined Facebook in: 2010 at age 21
Number of friends: 682
Number of emails received from Facebook in 2018: N/A1
Number of unread notifications in the last 4 weeks: 0 of 93
Number of actually relevant notifications: 76
Open the Facebook app/page: At least 10 times per day
Out of all of the editors at Digg, I'm probably the one that uses Facebook the most. While I don't post nearly as much as I used to, I still log on to Facebook a fair amount, so much so that Facebook is still one of the top suggested sites on my Chrome browser.
I find notifications to still be somewhat helpful. One of the biggest incentives for me to keep using the platform has been the fact that nearly all my Taiwanese friends are still very active on Facebook. And a few years ago, I got into the habit of adding some of my friends to my Close Friends list and now the notifications help me keep track whenever these friends post something. If I didn't have something like that, it would be easy for their statuses to get lost, especially since I'm regularly navigating between four to five different social media apps every day.
That's not to say I don't find Facebook notifications to be grating sometimes. I know there's a way to manage the notifications, but until this article, I've never been driven enough to do something about it. Instead, I've been more or less content to just inwardly groan and gripe about the numerous notifications Facebook has been deluging me with about the birthdays of people whose names I have trouble recalling or upcoming events from groups I've forgotten I've joined.
But speaking of annoying notifications from Facebook companies, I've recently realized I hate it when Instagram sends me notifications urging me to follow a hashtag. Yes, Instagram, I realize I've liked three posts tagged #goldenglobes this week and I'm ashamed of my obsessions. Get off my back.
Joey
Joined Facebook in: 2008 at age 15
Number of friends: 714
Number of emails received from Facebook in 2018: 206
Number of unread notifications in the last 4 weeks: 49
Number of actually relevant notifications: 10
Open the Facebook app/page: at least once per day
Facebook is bad about notifications. But as Digg's social editor, I use it a lot. I manage a handful of pages for work, and those send me a fair amount of notifications.
This was an interesting exercise because after looking back on my notifications from the past month, there were a handful of things in there that I completely missed, but would have been nice to know. Unfortunately, they were buried among a bunch of absolute garbage I do not care about. "This Tinder date from a year ago posted a photo." "Your friend's ex can't attend your friend's party." Hidden between reams of notifications like those laid a few nuggets that would have made my life a lot easier. It's too bad I just assumed they were junk too.
Steve
Joined Facebook in: 2006 at age 17
Number of friends: None (Deleted Facebook)
Number of emails received from Facebook in 2018: 477Open the Facebook app/page: Not anymore!
I chose to delete my Facebook account on September 9, 2018, partly in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and partly because I had something like a dozen notifications that were more-or-less Facebook telling me that someone liked someone else's post and so on. Two days later, Facebook deleted my account.
This was the second time I left the website. Shortly after graduating college in 2011, I deactivated my Facebook account because I wanted a "fresh" start to my adulthood, and logging back into Facebook where it's all your high school and college friends just really drags you back into who you were, I guess.
I reactivated my account in 2014 because I got into bicycle racing and that's where a lot of people who race bicycles hang out and organize. Now that I've decided that I'm going to ride bicycles for the rest of my life, and have found a group of friends who share that same sentiment — along with many other important values — I don't need to make the Faustian bargain with Mark Zuckerberg anymore. (I understand that's not how Faustian bargains work, unless you consider deleting your Facebook account a clever loophole.)
I can feel myself turning into some digital detox kook as I type this but: Facebook has taught us to be passive consumers of those we care about (and a lot of people we probably don't). I know that deleting Facebook is not about what you'd be denying Mark Zuckerberg, but what you'd be giving up. Delete Facebook and you'll know a lot less about everyone. And that's okay.
Your friends will still be your friends. They all have phone numbers and email addresses. You can ask people what their birthdays are and write them down on a calendar to remind you. If you want to see pictures of your nibling (the gender-neutral term for niece/nephew) or grandchild, you can ask. If you want to know what's going on in someone's life, you can ask. You don't need a website.
Laura
Joined Facebook in: 2005 at age 18
Number of friends: None (Deleted Facebook)
Number of emails received from Facebook in 2018: 22
Open the Facebook app/page: 0 times a day/week/month
I deleted my Facebook account on January 2, 2019, and I highly recommend it. I never had the Facebook app on my phone, so I didn't really see most of the notifications Facebook generated for me. I also changed my email settings so that I received basically no emails from Facebook. The emails I did receive in 2018 were overwhelmingly login alerts telling me I had logged in from a new browser. (I guess I appreciate the efforts to keep my account secure.) I also got two event invitation emails, and to Facebook's credit, they were both from real-life friends for events I actually wanted to go to. I have no idea how Facebook decided I ought to get these invitation emails but not other invitation emails.
Limiting the notifications and emails Facebook could send me did mean that I occasionally missed other event invitations I wished I had seen, but I'm glad I did it. It meant I logged into Facebook less often and gradually came to see that Facebook was playing no positive role in my life whatsoever, which made it easier to quit.
Mat
Joined Facebook in: 2006 at age 13
Number of friends: 803
Number of emails received from Facebook in 2018: 87
Number of unread notifications in the last 4 weeks: 52
Number of actually relevant notifications: 11
Open the Facebook app/page: at least 3 times a day
Recently, I have tried to leave Facebook multiple times for multiple reasons. Last year, I wanted to make a show of deleting it during my birthday party, only to discover that giving Facebook 24 hours ahead of the party to generate a data backup wasn't enough time. That time, I was motivated by the Cambridge Analytica clusterfuck and, since my birthday's in September, a sense of shame about having not left the site as soon as the news broke.
I tried leaving it again last month, only to repeat the second mistake I made in September: Facebook only hosts the archive of your stuff for a few days, so you've gotta grab it quick. My laptop hard drive has been nearly full for about two years (horrible, I know), so both times I went "ah, I'll grab an external drive and take care of this later" only to completely forget.
After both of those episodes, Facebook's notifications and emails started to get on my nerves because in addition to being pointless, they served as reminders that even with really good reasons to leave the platform I still haven't. The worst are the ones about the pages for my retired podcasts, which would be welcome if they didn't exist to tell me that literally one or two people clicked on them in the last week. I did those shows as a hobby, but getting emails about them over a year after they've ended serves as a horrible testament to the fact that I was not above serving up my own hobby as content to Facebook in pursuit of a small bump in listenership.
You'd think that when a friend of mine posted in no vague terms about a serious medical condition a few weeks ago that I'd have seen the post — especially since so many other people engaged with it. I didn't, and now the last, best reason I had to tolerate Facebook's constant nagging — the chance that it'd be a useful tool to receive news from people I care about — seems flimsier than ever. If I do manage to leave this time (my backup's waiting), at least I can leave with the confidence that I won't miss all the cloying red dots.
Eliza
Joined Facebook in: 2006 at age 14
Number of friends: 2,953
Number of emails received from Facebook in 2018: 02
Number of unread notifications in the last 4 weeks: 1103
Number of actually relevant notifications: 68
Open the Facebook app/page: Several times a day
In middle school, I counted down the days until I could join Facebook. The platform had expanded to include high schoolers and I couldn't wait to receive my high school email address, leave Myspace behind and take (what felt like at the time) the great leap to becoming a full-fledged teenager. College kids were on Facebook and real adults were (mostly) not. It was exclusive. It was cool.
Having been on the platform for so long, I have racked up a tremendous number of "friends" — people from summer camp, kids who hosted me while I toured colleges, boys I met once and thought were cute, several D-list actors that I boldy added (and, for some reason, they added me back) — basically, a lot of people that I only sort of know and don't think that much about. I have considered culling my friend list, but that seems like a lot of work and, hey, what if someday I do want to know what happened to that girl I met at Model UN in 2011?
This, partnered with my checking the platform several times a day, might explain why I receive so many dang notifications. As the stats above reveal, over half of the notifications I receive are meaningless. They include posts from groups I joined years ago (but haven't been bothered to leave), newly listed events at venues I occasionally frequent, items for sale, oh, and look! An acquaintance posted for the first time in a while! Wow!
I don't know how Facebook notifications — or any social platform notifications, for that matter — have rewired my brain. I grew up on the internet and know the red dot that screams, "Look at me! Look at me!" very intimately. I would be lying if I said I don't get a serotonin rush, a sense of personal validation everytime someone "likes" something of mine.
I deleted the Facebook application off my phone but it doesn't feel like enough when I know full well it's not a platform that I enjoy, only one that I have a strange compulsion to keep feeding. But, hey, at least I'm not getting "Candy Crush" requests from distant relatives anymore.
