Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
So, from what has been posted in this thread, they could use varying levels of alert. SO for an Amber Alert and your phone is in DND mode, you get a silent alert delivered, that you can see when you wake up, so the next time you look at your phone, which for most people is every 3 minutes anyway, if they are awake. If it is a Civilization Ending Meteorite, you get an audible alarm no matter what.
Why is that an improvement? Because you lessen the chance of people just ignoring it, or rolling over at the 3am, clicking whatever shuts it up and not looking at it because they have gotten an alber alert every 2 weeks, and it becomes routine to not read it. I think lots of other jurisdictions do it this way? I don't see this reducing the effectiveness of an amber alert in any way
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That’s the thing though. This “improvement” doesn’t actually improve it, because all it does is actually delay the response or increase the likelihood that one won’t look at it.
If we’re using anecdotes, every morning when I wake up, I clear right past the notification page and go right into checking messages, emails, and whatever else (in that order). Surely, I’m not the only one that does this. So what your “improvement” does is take the alert from something I would hear for sure, to something I would likely miss entirely.
The other issue? DND is not a “sleep time only” function, and can and is used throughout the day. There are people who use it ALL day. So those are, once again, people you’re eliminating from the alert pool for no real reason.
I’m all for improving the system, but I find that a lot of the “improvements” really are based on a few people not liking the user experience. The thing is, that doesn’t really matter. “How effective is the system at doing it’s job” is the only thing that will spark the need for change, and it seems like it’s doing a pretty great job (according to law enforcement, other officials, etc). That’s all that matters.
Unfortunately, and this is just going to always upset people, waking you up with a noise that you can’t ignore, even if you can ignore the alert itself, is always going to be better than a silent alert you can ignore completely from go. I don’t think anyone gives a #### about some of these improvements, because all any of them do is make the alerts easier to ignore, which is the opposite of what you want.
If it’s hard to ignore, less people will ignore it.
If it’s easy to ignore, more people will ignore it.
That’s how humans work. Let’s not go recommending “improvements” that don’t take the basics into consideration.