Engineering Custom Email Alerts For Reddit In 3 Steps

The Problem: Notification Overload

If you want to convert your phone to one of those vibrating restaurant pagers, might I recommend a Ring Doorbell camera*? The sensitivity of the sensors and steady pedestrian traffic means my phone inevitably buzzes, chimes or, during spooky season, plays “The Monster Mash” several times an hour. One of the other “perks” is access to a hive mind of your most concerned neighbors (via the Neighbors community).

*Not a paid endorsement; barely a recommendation

Inevitably, no matter which kind of community you live in, you’ll be drawn into a thread about someone thinking they’ve heard gunshots. Now, where I live, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. I live less than 10 miles from Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando. Each property has its own nighttime show with fireworks that make a “pop pop” sound eerily similar to gunshots.

Like hallucinated gunshots, the applications we install and find ourselves all-but-tethered to create a lot of noise in the form of push, email or SMS notifications. Worse, the content of these notifications are not weighted for magnitude. Everything is “Urgent” or “BREAKING.” More annoying than indiscriminate announcements, however, is the lack of customization regarding which alerts I, a user, can receive.

As an iOS user (and very minority Apple shareholder) my options are allow all notifications or to silence notifications entirely.

But recently, I found a use case and a method for engineering custom alerts from one of my phone’s loudest notifiers: Reddit.

Unfortunately, my use case is not particularly noble.

I’m not, for instance, working to create an app that filters the deluge of mislabeled or misinformed headlines that flood the site (maybe someday!)

I’m simply trying to buy a watch.

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