Can you explain what you would do if there was a decrease of 15% in the number of notifications being sent?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Clarify
 * All notifications from Facebook or related to specific feature or product?
 * Notifications sent via app or sent via email have reduced?
 * What time frame was the 15% drop for?
 * Are there any other metrics with unexpected drops?
 * Why is it important?

Let us say email notifications from FB to users about all FB products & features
have reduced over a month by 15%. Notifications are important because they cause
people to log in more frequently.
Question - Has there been a change in the algorithm used to generate
notifications?
Let us assume no, there has not been.
Validation -
I would firstly trend total notifications, DAU, Total daily number of users to
whom  notifications are sent for the past 3 months. I would check if I see the
decline mentioned and if I understand the metric definition correctly.
Let us assume that I do see a 15% decline in total notifications sent. the
decline is not sudden but gradual. This indicates it is less likely to be a bug
or data drop.
I'd like to investigate further by slicing the total Notifications trend created
above by country, users with less than 50 friends, 50-200, 200+ and check if
some group behaves abnormal.
Hypothesis -
Let us consider why the decline could be? Notifications come from activity of
other users or groups in a users network. Maybe the overall content creation has
gone down, there by feeding the notification algorithm less input.
Am I thinking about this the right way?
Adding to the above trends I started exploring, I'd like to trend total number
of posts generated over the same time period of 3 months.
Another segment to consider is the number of notifications broken out by
origination - were they notifications about friend's activity, posts on groups,
marketplace activity, reels, friend requests, videos.
Looking at all these trends, I might get a pointer on what is going on.
Say, I see notifications have dipped in the US but steady in other major geos. I
may also see a dip in marketplace notifications.
When I filter all above created visuals to just US, I may see that marketplace
notifications were the ones that were the contributor.
At this point, I would talk to engineering & PMs to check if they know of
anything going on with marketplace. Maybe there is a new feature being tested or
launched which is interfering with triggering notifications from there.

Anonymous · Answer

Talk to notifications product team to see if they have some background to this -
perhaps it was a deliberate initiative (i.e. reducing notification to improve
user experience and reduce churn from "annoying notifications"). Once this is
ruled out (i.e. that the fall is unintentional) I would plot a time series to
understand when exactly it happened, and do the same for slices of notifications
(e.g. friend requests, post likes etc.) to try to pinpoint whether it is an
overall problem or restricted to certain types of notifications.

Anonymous · Answer

I will take the input form customers and ask them if they would like to opt for
1)No notifications 2) Archived notifications (once per day or per week or per
month) - This should help me reducing some traffic to notifications as people
generally find too fine granular notifications intruding and its fair to expect
that atleast 20-30% customers might opt out of it.

Can you explain what you would do if there was a decrease of 15% in the number of notifications being sent?

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