For how long should a social media web application keep notifying a user of new likes on a contribution?

Question

I'm building a social media app that allows users to post contributions that other people can like. I was wondering for how long a user should keep getting new notifications whenever someone new likes a certain contribution.

I assume most people would want to know when their post/contribution is being liked but i doubt that they want to keep getting a new like notification for each new like a contribution receives.

I've looked at other social media websites to see how they handle like notifications. I've noticed that youtube typically gives you only one like notification whenever your comment is being liked. Its probably the first like action that triggers this notification. Any likes that come after the first one don't seem to cause a new notification to be sent.

I would like to hear your thoughts about how to best notify a user of new comments/likes on a particular contribution without overwhelming the user with too many notifications.

Thank you

Answer 1

Most of the notification systems/configurations that I have seen are based on one of two strategies. The first is to let the user select from a set of options like a daily/weekly/monthly summary of all the likes in the contributions, which is more manageable once the user's activity on the app increases. The second strategy is to let the user set the exact length of time and number of likes to trigger notifications since there might be some significance relating to these numbers (e.g. the number of likes on Facebook).

There are definitely examples that you can reference such as how Quora manages the various activities on a user profile (e.g. answer requests, likes, comments, etc.) but it depends on how you structure the content and collect/share user contributions, plus any analytics that you can gather from the frequency and volume of user activities can all help set meaningful defaults that you can allow the user to change.