There's been some people asking me lately why didn't respond to their question or why I didn't notice their post. At first I was wondering what they were talking about, I usually check most of my replies many times per day. Then they went on to ask which front-end I use for my daily activity on the blockchain and I told them that I use busy now and then for posting but mostly just Steemit.
"That explains it then, you haven't noticed my mentions" they said. I went on to explain to them why I don't use busy or gina bot at a time like this (although people have told me that you can customize gina a lot more nowadays - which I should give another try) but I thought I'll try and talk about my reasoning here as well.
I remember when I first started my Steem journey, connection was a very important aspect of getting any visibility or rewards on Steem. If you weren't using the early slack channel or steemit.chat then you had a really hard time connecting with other authors and curators and if no one even bothered responding to you than it felt like you were hitting a wall and not going anywhere. Of course nowadays we have a lot more of awesome projects and curation initiatives but there are still newcomers who might need that first push or have questions they want answered by someone with more experience. That's why I try my best to be around and reply and give everyone a chance, how those interactions go is for another post that I want to address, but for now let's go back to why I don't like notifications so much.
Although right now during the bear market and more silent times on the blockchain it has quite down quite a lot, but if you were to log onto my busy.org account and check the notification bar and especially mentions you'd wonder what I had done to piss so many people off. In reality it was users who right after the notifications from Steem were pulled off were still spam tagging a lot of users, they had literally created bot accounts just to tag people in comments to certain posts, etc all just hoping for that extra visibility or a chance for upvotes. It made it impossible to browse the platform normally and have regular back and forth discussions with people when the notifications were going wild.
I kept feeling more and more stressed about it and same thing happened on steem.chat and discord too. Thankfully I realized early how to remove the sounds cause that trigger was stressing me out so hard, no matter what you were doing a random sound would go off from somewhere of a tag or DM. Even after I turned the sound off it was pop-ups instead. It took turning off pop-ups and people not being able to DM me unless they were in the same discord servers as me for me to finally have some peace and quite again.
I read about this later that it's a huge stress trigger when receiving notifications and random times. Their test they had done was about having your phone further away from you so you can't reach it and constantly getting texts while you were trying to concentrate on something else made you so stressful. Now those texts were from your phone on test subjects that were getting texts from people they knew and probably wanted to receive them, now imagine how after some time it started to feel when people were constantly asking the same questions. Daily new people asking how this works, how that works, why this happened, why this person did this, why his posts aren't earning any rewards, etc, etc. It got to a point where I just decided to leave all channels on steem.chat and just not log in at all for a long time. The thing I liked doing when I had some more influence after knowing how difficult it was for newcomers became something I started to really hate. My stress was causing me to constantly be tired, have really weird sleeping patterns where I'd push my sleep a couple hours forward daily and rotate back to where I started after 2-3 weeks. Worst of it all were the chest pains I started to get. It felt like I really needed to take a break from it all and reconsider everything I was doing.
I managed to ease back into it a couple weeks later, constantly being "appear offline" on both steem.chat and discord and taking more time to myself and my own activity I wanted to do on Steem which I really enjoyed such as engaging with other people on the chain and posting with my account.
That's why I prefer Steemit with their non-working notifications, it's a lot more chill. As I said though I've been involved more and more during the bear market with the chats and glad to be helpful, but I learned that I have to balance my real life a lot more. Take breaks more often and just sit back and watch a movie or tv show more often and especially before going to sleep, it has helped.
Anyway, enough about my problems. Has anyone felt similar stress towards this subject? Our smartphones and PC's are such a huge thing of our daily lives now it feels as if we forget to do the things we used to before they came along.