Study reveals some teens receive 5,000 notifications daily, most spend almost two hours on TikTok

5,000 daily is 3.47 per minute for 24/7. Insane?

probably from all those people
who can't form a single sentence
without hitting "send"
every two words
- I heard it coined as they use the send button as punctuation.
- I kinda need to do this with my dad, otherwise he doesn’t notice texts. For example he texts me “Buy that spread for €0.79”. “Hazelnut or cocoa?” which if I don’t follow with ~5 question marks, he won’t even notice.
- I recently started dating again and noticed a lot of people do this now it’s very annoying.
- Wrong
- What's
- That?
- With
- What's the disadvantage? I really only see advantages.
  So here's an example:
  you: hey
  you: are you free right now?
  other: nah. Sorry
  other: but I shold have time around 17:00.
  you: Ok. Call me when you're done. It's kinda important
  other: Ok
  The first message introduces a conversation followed by a follow up. As soon as you send the first message it's easier to send the second one too since you already introduced the conversation.
  The other person then answers with a short answer where they don't really have to think about what they write and how they write it. You instantly get an answer.
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.
- notification bar zero
  What about permanent notifications? I've got "a few".
- I just glance at it and instantly swipe away what I don't need.
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.
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.

That's about 4990 more than I do.

I've disabled almost all of them. Even the ones I do get only appear as an icon on my notification bar. I don't even have lockscreen notifications anymore. I find it too invasive, and feel like the device is demanding my attention.

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.
- I have rule where if I install an app it sends me a notification that isn't necessary for the apps functionality it gets deleted forever. I'd have to make an exception for work apps but I don't think its been an issue.
  I have very few apps not from fdroid.
- all notifications should be opt-in.
  aren't they already? for the past few versions of Android, every newly installed app needs to ask you for permission to send notifications, and I'm fairly sure iOS has had it for even longer.
- Turn sounds and vibrate off. Then you can keep it in your pocket and enjoy silence.
Yeah, I’m with you. I declared war on notifications during covid and they suddenly became super annoying whilst working from home
- God, I wish I could get Teams to do that.
I disabled lock screen notification for a) privacy; b) so that I could see my nice lockscreen wallpaper

5000 per day?! That's insane. I feel like I get bombarded with notifications, so I checked how many I got today. Exactly 69.

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.

5000 notifications per day? That's over 3 notifications per minute.

Are they opting in to get a notification every time someone in a thousand+ member discord server posts anything at all?

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 can't emphasize how important it is for you to control your phone, especially notifications. Every notification is literally a mind hijacking attempt. Regardless of the type of notification, it's something that disrupts our thinking and our flow.

Some of them are necessary—but most aren't.

All the native apps will of course try to get as much permission from you as possible, including notifications. Don't allow this permission freely.

Get really strict about which apps need to send you notifications, and when. Take it from a dude who used to give free reign to all apps for notifications.

Once I started thinking in a more digitally minimalistic way, it made a huge difference. Running GrapheneOS actually helped with this a lot. But you don't need GOS to do this and feel the difference.

I got some notifications turned on, but most of em are silent. So they still get delivered, but they're not time-sensitive. They'll be there when I check my phone next. I don't need em interrupting whatever I was doing or thinking.

TL;DR: Be strict about which notifications you allow, and when. It'll do wonders for your thinking, productivity, and mental health.

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.
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.
- That unfortunately is going to be app dependent as far as I know. Your phone can set if a given app will alert you, but for example facebook would have to filter which friend's notifications get sent.
  An app that let you manage notifications by user across multiple platforms would be amazing.
  "I don't want to hear from Jay today" would be an awesome checkbox.
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.
- I don't disconnect my phone from internet because my usage is too spontaneous to always be turning it on or off. I do have my app permissions locked down though, GPS always off unless I'm using it, and nothing is allowed to run in the background except my VPN. I totally disconnect my pc from the network cable when I'm not actively downloading something though.

No one likes facebook anymore. It’s been junk for over a decade.

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....

WTF? Why do people like getting notifications at all? Every time I get one on my phone that is not important I am just full of anger because it is distracting me from getting stuff done.

For me, notifications trigger a small hit of anxiety
- Yeah me too. Fuck.
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.

5000? I get annoyed just from one from an app I forgot I had installed.

- My mom's phone looks like a notification factory exploded in her status bar. I bet she gets a dozen notifications a minute. She has all of her Facebook notifications on, set to push; she has weather notifications from multiple weather apps; she has email notifications, text message notifications, advertising notifications from random stores... it's hellish. Thankfully all of her notifications are set to silent.
  Anyway, having seen my mom's phone, I can well imagine 5,000 a day in someone who doesn't know or doesn't care about notification hygiene.
- It was also discovered that more than half of the participants received more than 200 notifications in one day, with some getting an incredible 5,000 notifications in 24 hours.

I don't have kids yet but things like these make me wonder how a parent would deal with the kids having a smartphone. If you don't get them one they're going to feel left out as you can be sure as hell that most other kids have one. 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. When I was a kid I did have a cellphone, and I had a PC too, but our house back then didn't have internet and receiving thousands of notifications in a single day was definitely unheard of back then.

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.
- That sounds too long to me. Since later in elementary school (3rd grade), smartphone (and tablet I had at the time) have been really useful tools for me. Sure, I definitely wasted plenty of time on Minecraft videos, but it's not any worse than TV. It helped me learn a lot of what I know now. Without that, I'd have problems getting into any high school. For example, it helped me fly through chemistry and physics like a breeze. Also I learned English, which has unlocked me access to even more info. I wouldn't have been able to pass 7th grade without studying for history, again on my phone.
  But of course, there was less crap than now. I am happy I got to grow up with YouTube channels like ExplainingComputers, ElectroBOOM, LGR, Scott Manley, Techmoan, The 8-bit guy, Tom Scott, Veritasium, Ted-Ed, and others I don't remember.
  But even before I had smartphone, I could already watch youtube on my Sony Ericsson W200i. That was something. It ran at like 5fps in SD quality, but it worked. And 50MB was basically infinite data.
- My friends gave their kids a cell phone at 12. Lots of parental controls on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- If you aren't even looking at most notifications why have them enabled? Just seems like you are torturing yourself by that point.
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.

5k notifications are 99th percentile. Probably the media is around 100-200 and average should be lower.

My stats say my phone gets ~140/day. I definitely ignore 99% of them, just like my 10k+ unread emails.
- I'm genuinely curious why you don't disable notifications you don't need, and unsubscribe from emails you dont want?

I'd go insane if I got 5k notifications in a day

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

Kids have not liked facebook in ages

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

Totally unrealistic. "Some teens" are the addicts that would have watched TV 16 hours per day if they were born 20 years before, young guys know how to manage notifications and most of them just don't care about them

Raises hand shamefully, then looks for the remote.

I think you can just say “everyone officially dislikes Facebook.”

Except grandmas

I turn off almost all notifications. I only allow messaging apps, and system notifications. Even then I find it too much to be honest.

I just have my phone always silenced except for phone calls from contacts.
Exactly same for me. Like, there's rarely anything urgent enough.

5000/day doesn't sound realistic, c'mon kids are addicted but it's not >5k per day. That's like one every ten seconds for your waking hours

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.
- Day after day, a message every few seconds?
Well it did say some which may make their wild exaggeration of a headline partially true so they can generate more clicks.
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.
There's no thing we can do that we won't enthusiastically overdo.

I'm 36, certified old to a teenager, and I think Facebook is the lamest of them all. They're all pretty toxic (even Lemmy can be, definitely reddit) but Facebook is easily top 3.

How? I hate getting any notification unless it's a text or phone call.

Two hours a day? Rookie numbers...

5000 seems like way too much. That's roughly 1 every 15-20 seconds, including at night.

I would be interested to see what percentage of those are actual real interactions (e.g. DMs), which are general interactions (e.g. "XYZ liked your post") and which are marketing CTAs.

Apps are designed for maximum engagement. I don't know if my experience is unique but I turned off all notifications in Twitter's settings, yet it still shows exactly one notification when I launch the app. Kinda creepy how blatantly they ignore your wishes to not get spammed.

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.

5000? lrn2 opt out. I'm always turning off notifications I don't care about. most. most apps overdo notifications and need to be silenced as a minimum. having my phone constantly doinking gets old pretty fast

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.

Kids don't like Facebook!?

They don't like posts that have captions like "wait for it" or "when you see it" for clips where nothing even slightly out if the ordinary happens?

I use FB for the messenger app, and even then most people I know who were on FB ditched it for Instagram ages ago. Basically useless.

Instagram is just Facebook with more pictures though tbf
- A plague on both their instances

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.
- skip washing your hands during the day
  That sounds like a good way to shorten your life.
How much cable did previous generations watch? 2 hours in an evening seems reasonable, maybe even low for some people
- Plenty of movies are >2 hours long, plus like an hour of advertisements.
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
It needs time to get into it
It's exhausting
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.
- How does sailing around the world or learning a new language makes you enjoy your life more?
  For the same reason that studying art makes you enjoy life more. You see things you've never seen before. You learn new things to appreciate and you learn how to appreciate things in a new way.
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.

Are those average?

This means there are even kids out there with probably double the amount

- Of course not.

ok? it's a different generation, they define things with difference importance, it's a part of growing up

I get an average of 30 messages/day, on the good days...

Good, let Facebook die in the hands of the children .

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.
- It's also kind of hard not to use at that age simply because it's like the telephone, just everyone uses it. I am no less guilty, but I loathe it.

throw your fucking phone away

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.

I seriously doubt anyone is receiving 5000 notifications a day.

Sounds like they are using the wrong term for “app thread gets posted or updated”. Just because someone is posting to Facebook doesn’t mean anyone is looking at it.

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.
- So you’re letting your phone vibrate or ping every 17 seconds? That sounds unnecessarily annoying.

Anyone actually know how to see a # per day?

Too lazy to manually count lol

Android (Samsung) has a Digital Wellbeing app that shows number of notifications (and source of each) when you tap "Screen time".
- I think this is a built in part of Android (or Google Services?) now. Have the feature on the original Pixel and on a OnePlus.
- Thanks, never noticed this tab before
  Guess I get about 170 a day

It doesn't even say a large number of teens, let a lone a majority, just some. This is not normal.

So here's an example: