“The infamous red dots, or badges, have been frequently called out by users for being irksome and distracting in nature”
Facebook is reportedly testing a feature that will finally let users turn off the infamous red dots on top of icons, groups, pages and videos, formally called notification badges. These red specks, which have been part of the Facebook interface for a very long time, have often drawn the mirth of users across the world for being unnaturally distracting amid the social medium’s white and blue theme.
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It has been a strategic move by Facebook, to spread the interface with red dots for features that it wanted to draw attention to. For instance, you would often find these badges on the more recently introduced ‘videos’ tab, which is one category that Facebook is trying really hard to market in order to establish itself in a competitive video streaming industry. The badges are also marked in group conversations, which draw you to particular groups based on Facebook’s content preference algorithms, in order to get you accustomed to the company’s upcoming groups-centric usage experience.
Facebook has confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature is indeed being tested, and only a select group of users will be able to see the feature right now. The new controls will allow a user to decide whether they do not wish to see any notification badges on the platform, or choose from groups, main menu, Facebook Marketplace, profile and others. The change has been spotted and revealed by social media consultant Matt Navarra and reverse engineering champion Jane Wong, who subsequently tweeted to show a glimpse of how the feature should look like.
Facebook is testing the ability to toggle Notification Dots of the specific tab in the app
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 1, 2019
This should address the long annoyance of tabs showing notification dots that don’t spark joy for the user pic.twitter.com/vtBLkbjKtE
For users that have been included in the pre-launch programme, accessing notification settings should lead them to the option to toggle badges. Many across the world are also seeing this move by Facebook as a positive nod to giving users greater freedom of what they wish to see on the platform. There is no word so far on when the feature would be made live, but given that it is already at a public testing stage, we may all expect to see it on our mobile Facebook apps, soon.
