Desperation Notifications
Social media platforms are leaning into deceptive design patterns to capture your attention but they’re just contributing to our growing “notification anxiety”
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They’re on the rise. They strike at you from a new angle every day now. Enticing you. Striving to pull you onto platforms you’re now trying to avoid. You’ve turned off so many notifications, but they just keep coming.
Let’s call them “desperation notifications.”
Facebook with declining engagement, platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are minting new types of notifications all the time now in a desperate attempt to maintain your engagement. They’re often deceptive design patterns crafted to look like the content pertains to you, specifically, although it doesn’t.
I got one like this one above this morning from LinkedIn, which read something like, “John Smith has a post for you.” I suspected this wasn’t the case, but I clicked through to confirm my suspicions and sure enough, John Smith did indeed have a post, but it wasn’t for me, specifically, and though John is a super nice guy, I can’t go over to LinkedIn to look at nice people’s posts every time they post something. LinkedIn is just trying to pull me into their platform. And that’s pretty much a “bait and switch” tactic if you consult Harry Brignull’s litany of deceptive design patterns.
Much as I love my pals Marko and Jonathon above, I didn’t have notifications from them, per se, either. They simply got a new job and posted on LinkedIn, respectively. (Congrats Marko!) I can see these things, of course, by … visiting my LinkedIn newsfeed. Now, this might seem like a distinction with little difference to some—particularly those designing and deploying these notifications—but, anecdotally, at least, my discussions with friends and colleagues over the past few months reveal a common theme: Folks are increasingly tired of all these notifications.
As my friend, the content strategist extraordinaire Rachel Lovinger said in our online discussion: “I’m so…
