Seth Michael Larson: Voicemail for notifications
I recentlysaw a thread on Mastodonabout the nagging notifications for mobile applications in particular, specifically ones that don't carry any useful information and simply remind you of the app's existence on your phone. Thanks toGlyphfor sharing this thread.
The thread made me think about what the future of notifications are when thinking about past many-to-many attention-demanding technologies, specifically phone calls.
My parents had an active landline only a few years ago, I can attest that the value-to-noise ratio on the landline was zero. The process to arrive there involved three steps:
- At some point, >90% of incoming calls were not welcome.
- Voicemail was added to avoid the aforementioned calls. This removed the "attention-right-now" ability of phone calls.
- Congratulations!Phone calls are now useless compared to text messages.
My parents knew that anyone who called was a "solicitor" or a scammer and so let every call go to voicemail and listened at the end of the day. My brother and I stopped calling the landline because they never picked up, we were calling and texting our parents on their mobile phones because those actually got responses. The network had destroyed its utility and most people moved on.
This isn't exclusive to landlines either, this happens on mobile phones, too. For example, my phone does not ring unless you're in my contacts list. Unknown phone numbers are sent straight to voice mail. The network has an extremely low value to noise ratio without this filtering, and it's hard to imagine how many scam victims and human lifetimes would be saved if this were the default for mobile phones. Alas.
Phones used to be a way to get someone's attention in the moment and have a conversation if the other party was available. "Getting someone's attention" was the whole point. The lack of authentication and filtering controls meant that the many-to-many attention-grabbing network was destined for this fate. Now notifications are in a very similar boat, and I am "calling" (heh) that one day notifications will either be a thing of the past (ie, most people disable them) or more configurable and filterable to match user expectations.
If you look at my phone, almost every application that actually generates notifications is either disabled or it's a messaging application like iMessage, Signal, Discord, etc. Apple does not make this easy at all, you need to click into each application individually and disable notifications (flashback to having to do the same for disablingApple Intelligence, coming from a "design-oriented" company).
So what would voicemail for notifications look like? All notifications received over the course of the day delivered as a sort of "newsletter" at a specific time of your choosing? Maybe the ability to "sinkhole" notifications that matched or didn't match a pattern. I want to see more APIs and experiments around notification management so that applications could be installed to manage notifications regardless of whatever bad UI Apple forces on its users.
I would love to see a mobile operating system manufacturer or app store actually embrace this future for notifications: the days of spamming users' pockets against their will is not long for this world. They do nothing for a company and only teach users to disable notifications. Will the utility of this "network" be preserved or continue down the road of users steadily disliking their time, friendships, and attention being abused for a fractional ROI?
This little thought exercise made me even more excited for "Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook" byLori Emersonwhich can bepre-ordered on bookshop.org. If you're reading this book (or others like it) and reach out!
https://sethmlarson.dev/voicemail-for-notifications?utm_campaign=rss
