Avoiding Notifications

Description
The dynamic occurs when users actively decide not to take part of an activity which is much likely to send notifications when changes are made to it.

Examples
A user might choose not to comment on some content on Facebook if there is a high likeliness that that specific content will yield a large amount of other comments. This because the user don’t want to recieve an equally large number of notifications via email or in the on-site notifications area on Facebook. The latter does only provide one notification item for every activity subscribed to and if multiple updates are made on the same content they will still only update the one notification (as of September 2011). However, if a user has an high activity and notices the update when it arrives, the notification area will still show each new update.

A solution to this would be to give the user an option to unsubscribe to updates on each content piece which would allow the user to recieve exactly the desired notifications, no more, no less.

Pros and Cons
This might not be a desired pattern when creating a site since it annoys its users and might make them miss out on certain content since they are ignoring other.

Relations
The mechanic of always notifying the user of each and every change to something that is (intentionally or not) subscribed to might trigger this pattern.

This behavior could be a result of Low Effort Reactions comsuming more effort than intended at one or several occasions.

The pattern is mostly sprung from Commenting (Crumlish & Malone) and Thumbs Up/Down Style Ratings (Crumlish & Malone).

Contributors
Created by Magnus Spånggård from the inspiration of Patric Westberg who also revised this article.