alt Hacker NewsInstagram is the worst offender, I only want to receive message notifications, but I got notifications about inane random stuff I've tried to disable but it won't work. I ended up having to disable notifications altogether.
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iamacyborg • yesterday at 10:55 PM
Instagram run their notifications via an auction mechanism (which I suppose makes sense for an advertising company that likely built a lot of RTB systems).
Instagram drove me so insane with that that I spent a while searching through the app to figure out how to disable it. There's a way to do it, and for a while it worked; I only got notifications about things like direct messages and posts from a few people I specifically told it to send notifications for, but I never got the "recommended" posts.
Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app, and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to spend all that time relearning how to disable those notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I open the app once a week or so to check in.
I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open it once a month to see who from high school got married in the last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.