Clawing for Attention

I understand the need for every app, especially the news ones, to claw for attention. I think the worst offenders do so and have sponsored/suggested ads peppered in through their content.

The Yahoo! Newsroom app is the worst of all the ones I have. Once I open it, I think I get 20-25 notifications within two or three days of news it believes I want to look at. Some of it is just the Yahoo! content, a good deal being videos. I’ve never been a fan of video news. Television news is fine, but video news in general has been iffy for me. Newsy has been an exception, though I haven’t quite given them as much attention as I had in the past.

Another offender is LinkedIn. They don’t do notifications quite as often, but they like to randomly have their badge light up just so anal-retentive people like me who want it gone can open the app. That then starts the cycle, because once one opens the app, more notifications come in. Pinterest too.

But it’s all free, so I really shouldn’t complain, right? Or turn off the notifications and badges? But then I might miss something.

Recommended Reading

I've, for quite a bit of my life, described myself as an information vampire. Whenever news apps like Flipboard and Apple News, as well as the Google Search app, have asked for my opinion on keywords and/or topics I'd like to see more of, I'd found myself tapping on many of them. I'd wanted to know about a lot of them (especially with countries/states that I don't hear about often, as I'd talked about somewhat before), even though there were limits to what I could read, or that the app would allow me to read in the case of Apple News.

There's only so much information I can take in because of biological need to sleep, limitations of my mind, and lack of desire to read certain stories (usually reality TV- or sports-related). Still, sometimes because something is "trending", it may still appear on my dashboard, which is a little annoying.

I'm generally not inclined to read sports just about as much as I tend to not watch certain videos. I don't want to outright say, or put into their minds, that I don't want to see those types of recommendations, but I don't really care to see them either.

That rationale sounds rather familiar ("I'm not racist, but I don't date Black/Asian/Latin@/White/whatever else people."). I guess this mindset comes in all kinds of forms, except some people just block people rather than have to possibly deal ("all the time") with having to reject someone because they don't fit your definition of "ideal".

We're hurtful creatures, humans.