You can now turn off most red notification dots in the Facebook app
The little red dots that appear on Facebook are synonymous with that sweet dopamine hit you get when checking your notifications. They scream out from the muted blue and white: pay me attention.
Now, the Facebook app will let you hide some of them to help you keep your chill.TechCrunchfirst reported the change, which has been confirmed by Facebook. We’ve also tried it out on Android and it’s working swimmingly.
Find outhow to use the off-Facebook toolto protect you data.
By pressing and holding the Groups, Marketplace or Profile tab icons at the bottom of the Facebook app in iOS or the top in Android, you are given the options ‘remove from shortcuts bar’ and ‘turn off notification dots’. You don’t get this option for the bell Notifications tab itself.
In other territories and versions, you can remove and edit the extra Watch, Events, Friend Requests, News, Today In, Gaming and Dating tabs too. That’s a lot of noise for you to quiet down.
So, while you can’t escape the red dot completely, you can now turn it off on all the other tabs to ease your red intake. Plus, you might not even want or use those tabs, so the option is there to take them away completely. Win win.
These small changes will be useful if you use the Facebook app a lot, but won’t do much to change your mind about booting it up anew if you’ve managed to ween yourself off Zuckerberg’s time-sap ad-machine. More power to you.
Author: Henry Burrell, Contributor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, Henry covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.
