[eloisius]

The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term but ultimately kill engagement. You can trick my sleepy self to stay up scrolling through ads for a while, but I can tell what’s going on. Afterwards I feel bad, and your app becomes something I am conscious of being bad for me. I try to cut back and will probably quit entirely except for a few specific uses with careful safeguards around them.

I never look at the news feed on facebook. About the only thing I use it for is specific groups that exist for a reason, like trading bike parts or finding apartments. FB lost its entertainment appeal years ago, other than occasionally ironically enjoying a boomer meme.

[Gigachad]

Twitter has shot themselves in the foot for me. I would be happy to get notifications for people interacting with my posts, but they spam me with random crap so I went to the settings app and turned off the toggle for notifications. Now they get to send me nothing. Ubereats did the same so I just uninstalled the app and reinstall it if I ever want to order something. They lost that space on my home screen because they kept spamming me with notifications which were not my order.

[airstrike]

Re: Uber Eats, now they also mark those notifications as "time sensitive" in the current version of iOS, including asking you to rate your meal or knowing that your delivery person says thanks for the tip. Even if I'm OK with getting those notifications, they are by definition NOT time sensitive

[Gigachad]

I think Apple needs to start making this as part of the review process and reject updates which set marketing spam as time sensitive.

[eloisius]

Supposedly it is in the guidelines. Someone provided a link to them last time it came up. Seems like it’s just unenforced. I wish they’d either enforce that, or give users some tools to filter them. Give me a naive bayes filter to train, regex, even string match. Anything.

[pixelrevision]

If you are wondering why you are seeing more of these it’s because apple changed their policy on this from a “no ads in notifications” policy last year. This change in policy is a net negative for users but it’s really hard for a marketing department to resist temptation.

[1024core]

> The irony is that all those engagement-boosting tweaks may work in the short term

That's when the promos happen and the bonuses are paid out.

> but ultimately kill engagement.

Too late. The PM's already jumped ship to the next gig.

[taneq]

Yep, the real root cause of the rot is that the people making the decisions no longer have the long term trajectory of the product at heart.

[Nextgrid]

I guess this is self-inflicted. Most companies pay shit so people milk them out for experience/achievements to then jump ship to the next one.

Maybe if you give zero incentive for your people to jump ship they'd be more likely to stay and actually care about the company's long-term?

[taneq]

Raising pay in the lower pay brackets will increase loyalty (but not enough to compensate for otherwise poor treatment) but once you get above 'comfortably well-off' pay grades, increasing compensation might also be necessary but it's not the answer, and all of the problems with product design here stem from the top. The only real answer is to hire people who drink the kool-aid, who genuinely believe in what you're doing for its own sake and aren't just there to pump their own careers and then cash out.

[1024core]

> Most companies pay shit so people milk them out for experience/achievements to then jump ship to the next one.

I wouldn't count FAANG pay as "shit".... and yet here we are.