Facebook finally lets you banish nav bar tabs & red dots

Over the weekend TechCrunch spotted the option to remove certain tabs like Marketplace, Watch, Groups, Events, Profile, Friend Requests, News, Today In, Gaming and Dating or just silence their notification dots.

The move could save the sanity and improve the well-being of people who dont want their Facebook cluttered with distractions.

Constant red notification counts on the homescreen are an insidious growth hack, trying to pull in peoples attention to random Group feeds, Event wall posts and Marketplace.

Youll see a menu pop up letting you remove that tab entirely, or leave it but disable the red notification count overlays.

For all of Facebooks talk about well-being, with it trying out hiding Like counts in its app and Instagram , theres still plenty of low-hanging fruit. Better batching of Facebook notifications would be a great step, allowing users to get a daily digest of Groups or Events posts rather than a constant flurry.Its Time Well Spent dashboard that counts your minutes on Facebook should also say how many notifications you get of each type, how many you actually open, and let you disable the most common but useless ones right from there.

If Facebook wants to survive long-term, it cant piss off users by trapping them in an anxiety-inducing hellscape of growth hacks that benefit the company.

Original article
Author: Josh Constine

TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

Josh Constine has recently written 11 articles on similar topics including :
  1. "There’s a strategic cost to the defection of Visa, Stripe, eBay, and more from the Facebook-led cryptocurrency Libra Association. They’re not just names dropping off a list. Each potentially made Libra more useful, ubiquitous, or reputable". (October 13, 2019)
  2. "Facebook may make it easier to escape its ranking algorithm and explore the News Feed in different formats". (February 18, 2020)
  3. "After eBay, Visa, Stripe and other high-profile partners ditched the Facebook -backed cryptocurrency collective, Libra scored a win today with the addition of Shopify". (February 21, 2020)
  4. "Permitting falsehood in political advertising would work if we had a model democracy, but we don’t. Not only are candidates dishonest, but voters aren’t educated, and the media isn’t objective. And now, hyperlinks turn lies into donations and donations into louder lies. The checks don’t balance". (October 14, 2019)
  5. "If their post has lots of Likes, you feel jealous. If your post doesn’t get enough Likes, you feel embarrassed. And when you just chase Likes, you distort your life seeking moments that score them, or censor it fearing you won’t look popular without them". (September 26, 2019)
  6. "Facebook plans to challenge Europe’s top court, which today ruled that EU countries can order Facebook to globally remove content that violates local laws". (October 4, 2019)
  7. "If I watch a Story cross-posted from Instagram to Facebook on either of the apps, it should appear as watched at the back of the Stories row on the other app". (January 23, 2020)
  8. "Facebook has diverted from its policy of not fact-checking politicians in order to prevent the spread of potentially harmful coronavirus misinformation from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro". (March 31, 2020)
  9. "$28 million-funded crypto startup Tagomi will be the newest member of the Libra Association that governs the Facebook-backed Libra stablecoin, TechCrunch has learned. A formal announcement of Tagomi joining was slated for Friday or next week". (February 26, 2020)
  10. "Its an open secret that every company is on fire, says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before. Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams". (February 10, 2020)
  11. "Facebook is suffering from a massive bug in its News Feed spam filter, causing URLs to legitimate websites including Medium, Buzzfeed, and USA Today to be blocked from being shared as posts or comments". (March 18, 2020)
Posted on