The notification tray stopped being for you a while ago
The honest split is between "here's something you asked to know" and "here's a reason to open the app." Those are two different products, and they wear the same icon.
The tell is how many of your notifications are about the app instead of about you. Someone you follow went live. A feature you never touched got an update. A streak is about to expire. People are active in a group you muted months ago. None of that is information you were waiting for — it's a scheduled tap on the shoulder, and the schedule is tuned to whatever keeps daily active users from sliding.
What's strange is the interface never bothered to separate the two. A message from a friend and "your post got 3 new views" land in the same tray, buzz the same way, wear the same little red dot. The dot doesn't rank importance because the ambiguity is the point: if you can't tell which one matters without opening it, you open all of them.
And the fixes are all individual and all lossy. Kill everything and you miss the five that were real. Leave them on and you've handed your attention schedule to someone's retention team. Per-app tuning holds until the next update quietly switches the annoying ones back on.
I keep landing on the idea that this has to be solved at the OS level — a hard wall between "a human is trying to reach me" and "an app wants me back" that the app isn't allowed to cross. Has anyone actually built a notification setup that stays sane for more than a few months, or does it always rot back into noise?
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