Not all notifications are treated equally.
Systems continuously assess importance, relevance, repetition, and interruption cost.
As a result, some notifications break through immediately while others are quietly deprioritised or filtered away.
This section explains how priority is inferred, why similar notifications behave differently, and why your experience may not match someone else’s.
The focus is on understanding selection behaviour, not controlling it.
Notification priority is not fixed. An alert that once interrupted you may later arrive quietly — or not at all. This change is usually intentional, not a malfunction. Why priority is recalculated continuously Notification systems don’t assign priority once and keep it forever. They continually reassess based on: Priority is a moving value, not a … Read more
Seeing the same notification stop alerting you can feel confusing. You may think: • the system is broken • alerts are being dropped • something has changed unexpectedly In most cases, repeated notifications are intentionally de-emphasised. ⸻ Why repetition reduces alert value Notification systems assume that: • repeated alerts carry less new information • interruption … Read more
It can feel unsettling to realise that not every notification is meant to reach you. You may assume: In reality, selection is a core feature of notification systems. Why selection exists at all Without selection: Notification systems exist to filter information, not transmit everything. Reaching you is a decision, not a default. How systems decide … Read more
Missing an alert that feels important can be worrying. You may assume: • the system failed • the alert should have broken through • something went wrong In many cases, the notification was recognised but intentionally softened. ⸻ Why “important” doesn’t always mean “interrupt now” What feels important to a person isn’t always urgent to … Read more
When a notification doesn’t alert you — or arrives quietly — it can feel dismissive. You may think: In most cases, the notification was intentionally downgraded, not ignored. What “low priority” actually means Low priority does not mean unimportant. It means: The system made a choice about attention, not value. Why systems prioritise notifications at … Read more