Study reveals some teens receive 5,000 notifications daily, most spend almost two hours on TikTok | Kids officially don't like Facebook

probably from all those people
who can't form a single sentence
without hitting "send"
every two words

I know a lot of people who never change their Discord notifications. They get notifications for every message in every channel in every server. It's insane.

Obviously they do not actually interact with these notifications. They tune them out, and I guess eventually they will swipe them away. Personally it always stresses me out a little when I see their phones with a hundred notifications. I've never been a proponent of "inbox zero" for email, but "notification bar zero" has been my standard way of using smartphones for as long as smartphones have existed. If I got 3 notifications per minute on my phone, I would probably smash it with a hammer and go find a nice cave to retire to.

This number is skewed by Notifications John, who receives millions of notifications a day and should not be counted

I feel like I'd install a bunch of shit before getting anywhere close to a tenth of that. I'd hate my phone. However, I'm far from being a teenager and their ways and methods have become somewhat mysterious.

I can see my phone getting that if I let every app just push whatever they want. I purposefully and carefully go through and ensure I'm only getting notifications for what I need them for.

I average 250 a day. With 3/4 of those being messaging apps.

Easily achievable if you participate in group chats.

Probably also random games and apps spamming you to play them

Holy shit man. That sounds so stressful

60% of the group get less than 300 80% get less than 500

5000 is probably a very very small percent, and probably kids that have a shit load of followers.

I get a lot, although not that many, but I have sound turned off for most and clear them like once a week or so.

IMO all notifications should be opt-in. I basically have everything but my phone, text messages, and Outlook email off. The constant buzzing throughout the day was driving me insane.

Yeah, I’m with you. I declared war on notifications during covid and they suddenly became super annoying whilst working from home

I disabled lock screen notification for a) privacy; b) so that I could see my nice lockscreen wallpaper

I've developed some PTSD like symptoms for when my phone goes off.

Notification, call, whatever. Immediate panic and I have to remember to breathe.

Even trimming every notification I can, it still happens several times throughout the day, and my phone only has audible notifications when I'm at home, most from my wife.

I left that job over a year ago and still I can't shake it.

Agreed. The only notifications I have on are for my email and texts. The first thing I do when I download a new app is turn off notifications.

Agreed. Use the screen time app on your phone, go overboard with it. I allow 30 min for Tiktok, 10 for IG, 45 for web browsing in general, 20 for Telegram, and even these I feel are too much, but I get so bored at work. It's really easy just to get into a flow state and not realize you sat there for an hour straight staring at your phone. Trying to find more small paperbacks to keep in my pocket to replace this.

Also the "Clockify" app on PC can track how much time you are using it. You can set it to remind you certain amounts of time like Pomodoro when using which is great and makes you conscious of how much time you're using.

I just wanted an easier way to filter what is notified. I don't care if X or Y promoted profile posted, but I want to know if a friend did.

I am still kind of in a state of dissonance after learning that some people don't disconnect their phones from internet when it's not directly used. That just feels wrong on some level. Cursed, I'd say.

Nice.

I feel like you have a nice balance that still feels too intense sometimes. I bet I get maybe 30 on a normal day and 50 on a busy day.

Lessoning notifications is one of the things I actively strive for to enjoy life more.

Nice.

I think it might be notifications for group chats they're in. Maybe spread over multiple apps? Anecdotally I remember having the same friend group on multiple apps, with a couple of members missing/added in each. So many times the same topic create double or triple notifications. But 5000 is insane...

I was in middle school when it was getting really popular, now it's like that one guy from High School you try to forget about....

For me, notifications trigger a small hit of anxiety

Literal doses of happy chemicals get released because attention. You should watch the Social Dilema if you haven’t already.

You can literally get people hooked on this and retrain on what is good happy time and what is not good happy time. Shit is scary.

I get notifications for precisely two things: Texts and emails. And only emails because of work. Otherwise it would only be texts. I turn off all other notifications the second I install the app because I don't need that shit.

That’s a very valid concern. Personally, I think parents should keep their kids away from phones much longer. While I’ve only got a kid on the way, I’m hoping to keep them off of smartphones until high school.

1. disable notifications for most apps. I'm not sure if you can do it for iPhone, but any android phone, you can stop any app from sending any type of notification, even separating based on category. Eg. Turning off all youtube notifications except for security ones.
2. Have your kid read books, this will do wonders in helping them get ahead near the start of their school life, as well as doing wonders on their creativity and imagination.
3. Limit their screen time, and force them to find something else to do with their time. My mum did this to me, I hated it growing up, but I'm incredibly grateful now. It forced me to find ways to have fun without technology.
4. Drop these restrictions down when they are a teenager. Teenagers want freedom. Hopefully, through making your kid read books while growing up, they will choose to read books in their teenage years. I know I did, and both my sisters did.

Although this is the thoughts from someone who is 20, going off their own recent experience and from watching their siblings, I would definitely love to hear thoughts from others about this, tho.

I’m no psychologist but to me if you buy your kid a smartphone then you basically risk having him/her destroy his/her brain cells and attention span with Tiktok and Snapchat.

Things this has been said about before: internet, computers, video games, cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, comics, pulp novels, newspapers, the printing press, widespread ability to read/write...

Hell, the first kid to utter a word probably got growled at.

Just because we can't keep up as we get older, doesn't mean the kids are doomed. They live at a faster pace than us, it's always been like this. It's just technology didn't change as fast.

I hope to teach my kids the beauty of Do Not Disturb. I get a lot of notifications but they don't notify me.

My classmates get similar amount of notifications. It doesn't seem to be a problem, they just ignore all of them. There's no way you're going through each of those.

Let's write 5k comments... evil laughter

My stats say my phone gets ~140/day. I definitely ignore 99% of them, just like my 10k+ unread emails.

They've reported it for ages, but it's only been in the last few years that they've actually been not signing up.

Except grandmas

I just have my phone always silenced except for phone calls from contacts.

Exactly same for me. Like, there's rarely anything urgent enough.

Raises hand shamefully, then looks for the remote.

Consider, if you will, a modest to large group chat. Say a few people start chatting. dindingdingdingding People float into and out of the chat keeping it going for hours and notification after notification after notification comes in. Maybe they're in a group chat for several classes and/or interests and/or family. I can easily see it. I have to mute the group family chat I'm in when they really start to get going, especially my wife and sister-in-law.

Well it did say some which may make their wild exaggeration of a headline partially true so they can generate more clicks.

There's no thing we can do that we won't enthusiastically overdo.

I'm honestly wondering since study seem to primarily include Android users. It seems like the only main statistics they showed about notifications was for the most popular ones (including about eight specifically). It feels strongly plausible that 5,000 notifications a day could be coming from eight different apps.

Also, given how a lot of Android notifications are used for things like background updates, or also things like media controls (which are technically treated as notifications). This would also add a bit of plausibility to that metric. Especially in the case of a more digitally savvy user.

At some point notifications changed from solely "Look, this person interacted with your thing" to include things like "Look, someone on your friends list added a person you dont know" and i just know this boosted metrics enough to get some jackass a bonus.

I already get an internal struggle to scream out of frustration every time I see the mail box of one of my colleagues having 100+ unread mails. Most coming from automated systems like Jira, Jenkins, etc. I funnel all those mails into separate folders, and just click through them once in a while. Or mass mark them as read.

I don't think I could survive 5000 notifications.

Instagram is just Facebook with more pictures though tbf

There's an entire generation (40+ years old? Maybe a little younger?) who will never leave Facebook. It's like AOL was for their parents. They know how to use it, their friends and family are on it, and they won't quit using it until they're dead.

Android (Samsung) has a Digital Wellbeing app that shows number of notifications (and source of each) when you tap "Screen time".

I seriously doubt anyone is receiving 5000 notifications a day.

Have discord mobile.

Be in a big, active room. Or multiple active rooms.

Have notifications on.

Easy.

You can play that game with anything though.

• watch 1 30min show a day: 182hrs
• sleep 8hr instead of 7h: 365hrs
• skip washing your hands during the day: 10-20yrs You called convince yourself to stop exercising? Stop eating breakfast? Stop reading? Stop talking to friends? Stop wasting time on hobbies?

People can pick what they waste time on for themselves. I’m not going to spend 2hrs/day on social media, but I might play a video game, read a book, hike in the woods, watch a movie, organize photos, whatever. It’s my time, and mentally checking out for a bit doing something that’s not “productive” gives me energy I can apply to other pursuits.

How much cable did previous generations watch? 2 hours in an evening seems reasonable, maybe even low for some people

So what? Every generation has their form of entertainment. How is this worse than reading a book or watching TV or playing a video game for fun? Or spending your time on Lemmy? Or really just doing anything for fun where you don't expect an outcome. I don't want to work every living minute.

Also yeah, you could learn a language a year if you do it every day but

1. It needs time to get into it
2. It's exhausting
3. It's repetitive and gets boring fast.

Social media is mostly used if you don't have anything else to do and can't just leave. So like on the toilet or in school. Also who says they aren't doing something productive while watching? It makes repetitive tasks less boring. So you can totally still learn carpentry while watching TikTok or anything really.

Time you enjoy isn't time bad spend. Why do anything you hate doing? How does sailing around the world or learning a new language makes you enjoy your life more? Also: how is sailing the sea more productive than watching TikTok when most of the time, you do nothing on the ship.

Sailing around the world costs money, but you can learn about other places through other people sharing their experiences on tiktok. There are livestreams teaching language, where you can get a much more personalized teaching and your questions answered without judgement for interrupting, there are carpenters sharing useful tricks, and showing how to build things for yourself. There are livestreams showing how to operate a crane at a shipping port, and what that career is like. TikTok has a lot more than the dancing, meowing, and giggling, although if that's what you watch a lot of and interact with, it will happily give you only that, but that's a user problem, not a platform problem.

Because phones aren't a basic necessity in the Western world in 2023 or anything.

Yes don't use this specific copy of a computer use this one instead.