My elderly in-laws have lept at the chance to get rid of landlines, only to be replaced by near constant WeChat or iMessage pings. It was this at this point that I discovered that they’re not alone and most people live with near constant mobile notification bombardment, putting almost zero effort in taming it. It took me a while to condition them to use the silence slider which they were barely aware of. Then it made me wonder if messenger apps were actually an improvement. Landlines had the advantage of being completely out of mind when you’re away from home.

Mobile phones & modern notification systems are strictly better in terms of flexibility. As you said, you can silence all notifications for arbitrary periods of time and schedule quiet times, but if you need you can still access them any time you want. Landlines' async notification channel is limited to a voicemail, which... well, it sucks.

Definitely agree there, I’m not proposing going back to landlines or any variation. That said, I feel like the fact that just about any app you install signs you for all the notifications all the time is a bit of a dark pattern.

Totally agree with that, the first time an app sends me an ad/nag disguised as a notification, it gets blackholed.

Related, I really like the notification summary feature of iOS - it delays showing you a notification and rolls all them up into a summary every (configurable) N hours. You can exclude priority apps e.g. a messenger you know you want realtime notifs from.

I was sitting at a table at a sports club the other day where a young fella had put down his phone. It lit up and I saw a terrifying stack of notifications, 20+ messages per app, more apps than space on the lock screen. If I get one then I read it and it I get too many that I don't read then I stop them because they're clearly about something I'm better off reading at my leisure rather than being alerted.

My iPhone looks like that because you have to manually interact with or swipe to clear notifications to remove them from the stack. And usually I get all the information I need by looking at the preview.

I recommend turning off most notifications in the settings except the ones you absolutely need for your work and family. iOS has a pretty good level of granularity.

My elderly mother-in-law is pretty good about the scams but the part that I can’t understand is that she treats every land line phone call as the highest priority thing in the house. She will drop everything to answer the phone.

It's what we all grew up with if you're older than about 50. The phone rings, you answer it. It's a habit. Even caller id wasn't really common, and it cost extra.

OTOH I'm in that age group. I dropped my landline a long time ago, and I never answer calls on my mobile unless the caller is in my address book. I don't have voice mail either. The habit of answering the phone was not hard to stop, there was a bit of FOMO (if you can call it that) for a while, but every time I answered such a call it was a scammer or a survey or some other nonsense so that's pretty much gone away.

Maybe for those that are truly elderly it's just something to break up the boredom of sitting at home.

It is worse than that. For those old enough to remember, at least in the USA the old Bell System ad's from the 50's and 60's were to be sure to answer all calls within three rings. That 'within three' part got burned into the minds of the generation that is 75+ now, which is why so many of them treat a ringing phone as 'absolute number one priority'. Me, I heard the #*$&$ thing ring so much growing up, with 80-90% being sales calls, that I can listen to a phone ring, ignore it, and go on about whatever it is I was doing that the caller so rudely wanted to interupt.

No I don't remember that. In elementary school at some point we had a little lesson on using the phone, how to answer, what to say if your parents weren't home, etc. They told us it's rude to let the phone ring more than 10 times if you are calling someone. I don't remember anything about answering within 3 (or any number) of rings.

i wonder if the within-three-rings push dates to when there were actual operators connecting calls. their employer would not want them to be spending a lot of time waiting.

> I don't have voice mail either.

isn't that standard for most providers? plus, even if most of the calls are scams or pointless, some might not be, and I'd rather get a message than not.

I just mean I never set it up, and I never check it. I don't even know how to check it, or whether it's recording messages or not.

> I can’t understand is that she treats every land line phone call as the highest priority thing in the house. She will drop everything to answer the phone.

I'm 30 and haven't been able to break myself of this. When I was a kid scam calls just were not a thing where I lived and if someone was calling it mattered. Absolutely nothing took priority over the phone.

> It was collective insanity to have such a loud device constantly interrupting us.

Not to mention all the bruised toes and shins from running for it. Especially prior to answering machines being ubiquitous, at the risk of dating myself.

Oh of course, it was an emergency! Nothing could be more important than answering the phone.

Very few things are worth literally running toward. Even fire drills involve walking to evacuate.

They're bored. It's a lot of work to stand up and leave the house. Phonecalls are the most convenient and accessible human interaction they have. My grandmother loves talking to people she knows are scammers, just to ease the tedium. She's been talking to the same neighbors and children for literally fifty years otherwise.

The was called the phone being "off the hook" where you lifted the receiver and put it to the side.

In the UK, a siren goes off if you do this for more than like 15 mins.

You can of course just unplug the whole phone at the wall - but you have to do that for every one in the hosue.

> a siren goes off if you do this for more than like 15 mins

What? Is there a place I can read more about this or hear what it sounds like? Is it an actual siren or just a tone to remind you that it's off the hook?

It’s very similar to the sound that dialing a phone (touch tone) makes, but higher pitched and pulsed four times a second. It was VERY LOUD, enough to cause pain if you put it up to your ear. The idea was to help let you know that your phone fell off the receiver even if you weren’t nearby.

Edit: the reason this matters is that call waiting was not a standard feature. So if your phone was off the hook, it would not be able to ring and receive a call, the person calling you would just get a “busy signal” which is a lower pitched two-tone beep that is on and off every second. You still hear that from time to time in modern phone systems when they are overloaded.

it's a tone played through the earpiece speaker, but it is very loud - ie. loud enough you can hear it from another room in your house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-hook_tone#:~:text=In%20the....

I assume phones have to be designed with the earpiece speaker robust enough not to be fried by such a tone, and therefore it must have been around for a long time.

I used to have my landline wired up to a blinking light and I kept the ringer off.

I still keep the ringer off, but now I never answer my phone 'cause it's always in my pocket and I can't see it.

You were the smartest of us all.

Phones weren't such a loud device constantly interrupting us. When they became this, people stopped having them.

My grandparents didn't have a phone until fairly late, but my grandfather worked irregular hours on the docks. For them a landline is the peace of mind of knowing loved ones are safe.

Mobile phones are useless because they are never charged when you need them.