I know this isn't the directly the topic of the article but the title "attention is your scarcest resource" reminds me that I wish there was some pledge/badge of "we will not intentionally distract you and provide options to reduce distractions" pledge for apps and websites.
It drives me nuts for example that discourse has "achievements" to distract you. Every discourse forum I join for customer service is yet another 15 distracting achievements begging for my attention. It's not that I care about the achievements, it's that it's the same notification system that I got a new message so I'm compelled to go see if the highlight is a new message and when it turns out it's not, it's a dumb achievement badge then my time has been wasted and my mind has been distracted.
Multiply this by 50 apps to 100 apps/sites etc and it's clear that features as such that can't be turned off are irresponsible toward and disrespectful of users. That idea that you're a bad person if you design and create such distractions needs to spread.
I work at Discourse; there is new functionality coming in the 2.6 release to address this issue, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/let-experienced-users-skip-new-.... When you join a new community you will be able to click an option that skips all of the Discobot tutorial and the new user badge notifications (which are the basic ones like First Like).
This is great! Can I opt out of all badges or only "basic ones".
Of course it will be a decade before everyone updates to a version that supports this option and allows the user to enable it. In the meantime we'll have our time and attention wasted for years (T_T)
There's another, automatically getting spammed with emails and then having to manually opt-out. I get you want it to be frictionless but when signing up a opt-in checkbox for email would respect my time and scarce attention than opting me into daily emails and forced me to later opt-out.
And sorry to pick on Discourse. There's tons of other offenders but Discourse is one most people on HN have experience with. Steam/Xbox/Playstation all have the same issue. Wasted time and attention required for things I don't care about. The worst is the OS popping up achievement notifications right over the climax of some scene. That others care is fine. Just let me turn them off because "Attention is your scarcest resource".
@greggman3 Congratulations on your new Discourse badge "Differentiator" for replying to a feature request with a new feature request.
Disclaimer: Not a real badge, and I don't use Discourse. Sounds like the developers are very responsive, and it's probably a good tool, this was just easy and fun.
What is particularly nice about hacker news is that this comment didn’t actually generate a notification. OP has to actively decide “I want to look at that conversation again”, and then navigate to it.
It’s actually quite nice, I only remembered I posted this comment just now and I came back and saw it had some upvotes and extra comments which was a nice surprise.
That automatic email issue is an interesting one, I will take a look and see if there are similar complaints or internal discussions. I know we have some ideas about letting users choose which categories they are tracking on signup instead of auto opt in, emails would be another great thing to do this with (I have turned off email notifications for the Discourse forums I am a member of FWIW.). Thanks for the extra comments!
Slack does this too. Slackbot sends you "getting started" tips by default, which led to me receiving an email to ensure I enable notifications. That email was sent out of office hours on a Friday evening too. I'm sure it wasn't intentional but it made it look like an insidious attempt to cram itself as deeply into my attention span as possible.
One way to deal with this is to use the element picker mode of uBlock Origin. Often it's not too much of a hassle to just zap the bell icon and be done with it.
This is enabled by default, but it can be disabled by site admins. On the three.js discourse, for example, we disabled this "feature" pretty soon after creating the forum.
It drives me nuts for example that discourse has "achievements" to distract you. Every discourse forum I join for customer service is yet another 15 distracting achievements begging for my attention. It's not that I care about the achievements, it's that it's the same notification system that I got a new message so I'm compelled to go see if the highlight is a new message and when it turns out it's not, it's a dumb achievement badge then my time has been wasted and my mind has been distracted.
Multiply this by 50 apps to 100 apps/sites etc and it's clear that features as such that can't be turned off are irresponsible toward and disrespectful of users. That idea that you're a bad person if you design and create such distractions needs to spread.