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Make notifications less addictive

This is a bit of vague feature request, but I hope I’m not the only one who finds notifications a bit too Engagement-y.


I am not immune to little dot indicators, and I imagine a lot of other people also aren’t. Someone Interacts with one of your posts or comments. Now there’s like, a little dot (or number) on the notification bell. Whoa. You gotta open that tab. Open it. Open it Now. Right Now. etc.


Here’s some thoughts on how to avoid this:

  • Literally just close the whole cohost website: yeah I guess you could do that, and I do this myself, but,, see below point about push notifications. I will still compulsively open cohost again to Check1
  • Have the indicator ignore uninteresting notifications: have an option to stop counting likes and transparent shares towards the unread count.
    While these types of notifications can be filtered on the actual notifications page with userscripts, they cannot be filtered from the counter.
  • Have the indicator appear less frequently: currently, the client checks for unread notifications every 30 seconds. I think being able to increase this interval to, like, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour would be very nice (…maybe synchronized to be relative to the most recent post).
    Ideally this would also mean that notifications only appear in that interval on the actual notifications page (and api endpoint) as well. I guess it’d be like some kind of notification digest. Then you wouldn’t be tempted to open the notification page to Check Anyway—I believe Not Knowing Whether There’s A New One and Being Compelled To Check Frequently is far worse than Knowing There’s A New One And Then Checking.
  • Web push notifications: delegating notifications to your OS’s notification center by having cohost send push notifications is also a good option, I think, when combined with the above.
    I believe push notifications are better than indicators, because you are now no longer compulsively checking anything at all—it’ll tell you when there’s something to see.
  • Some other fifth thing: I dunno! maybe there’s a Novel New Way of doing Interactions on a website that no one has thought of yet because most designs so far have been engagement-driven or been derived from one that is

1: some of this feature request also applies to dashboard posts, I suppose


33 people like this idea

i would LOVE to be able to configure all this


9 people like this

im pretty sure at least 50% of this is either overkill or not very well thought out.but. quick mockup for a concrete idea of how batched notifications might work


image


4 people like this
Notification filtering (bullet point no. 2) has an open feature request at https://help.antisoftware.club/support/discussions/topics/62000183153. Also I agree, the notifications here are too damn addicting, even with the number off.

2 people like this

all of the suggested features would be great (and im a big fan of the lack of numbers already), but i'd also like to add: the Option to simply just Disable the notification dot entirely. personally, the lack of notifs gives me a little more peace of mind, leaving me to check the notifications page Only whenever i think of doing it myself, without any external prompting.

i usually set this up via custom css styling browser extensions for all the social media sites i use, but i figure letting Anybody do it Easily could be nice, too?


4 people like this

Posting here instead of a new topic, because I feel like this aligns with "make them less addictive". A feature I've seen on bookwyrm that I would look to see here is treating faves/shares as a lesser tier of notifications than replies/comments. On that site the notification bell has two shades of notified (light blue for lesser stuff, red for things where someone wrote a reply). If I could see that all the notifications I have are just faves I'd be less likely to check it as often.

I guess my ideal version of this feature would be being able to individually select for each kind of notification whether I want to get a badge, just appear in my notifications view, or not appear at all


6 people like this
This would be really nice to have
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