Notify Feature can be easily abused

Feature
63

The removal is now merged :ship:

From the inception of meta we have 377 usages of this feature.
In the last week it was used 5 times.

2 times to notify an anonymous user.
1 time to bug @codinghorror about the topic discussing this feature
1 time to test on discobot
1 time which may or may not be legit.

Feature is mostly abandonware and for very good reason.

Looking wider into the industry Facebook have 2 features that are similar:

  1. User poking: https://www.facebook.com/help/219967728031249 - which is implemented pretty much the same as the old notify, except that you can only poke a user

  2. Mobile only “Send” feature. Which lets you send a DM to a user of your choosing with the link pre-filled.

So if you have a hyper social feature not implemented by the biggest social network in the world, there is probably a reason (or two):

  • Lack of context - sharing with no context causes tremendous amounts of mental load on the share-ee cause you are stuck scratching head and asking “why?”

  • Asymmetrical warfare - trivial sharing like this is radically less work for the sharer than the sharee

  • Enormous amounts of alternatives that are better - PM link, DM link, email link, paste link in chat, in some cases whisper, in some cases mention

So we have a feature that is largely abandoned, only used by a handful of power users, ripe for abuse (and is abused regularly on meta).

Friction is a feature here, not a bug.

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