Facebook has cultivated a habit of making grave mistakes and then apologizing for them, and yes, also acting victim at the same time. The most recent case is of a bug, which automatically changed the affected users’ post sharing settings to ‘public’, which was later addressed and affected users were notified of the same.
The company is now trying to fix another oversight which proved to be a huge annoyance for users – the pesky ‘You Are Now Connected On Messenger’ notifications. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is in the process of the scaling back the notifications, and might even stop them altogether for users who never bother to check them.
As we are well aware (read: bothered), when you become friends with someone on Facebook or when they join Messenger, a notification instantly pops up to inform that you are now also connected on Facebook Messenger. Once you receive the notification, you need to go to the Messenger app and open that auto-generated ‘Say hi with a wave’ conversation to clear it, or start a chat thread. It is annoying, and Facebook knows it.
“We’ve found that many people have appreciated getting a notification when a friend joins Messenger. That said, we are working to make these notifications even more useful by employing machine learning to send fewer of them over time to people who enjoy getting them less. We appreciate all and any feedback that people send our way, so please keep it coming because it helps us make the product better”, a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.
By the way, ‘Enjoy getting them less’ is Facebook’s way of saying that these notifications are irritating for some users. So now, when you don’t bother to open them, its machine learning algorithm will send fewer such notifications. Well, hopefully.
