My best friend messaged me on Facebook Messenger. It wasn’t urgent, so I swiped the notification away, making a mental note to reply later. Ten minutes later, Facebook sends another notification. “Reminder: [My friend] sent you a message.” This is clingy, even for Facebook. And it’s not the only app increasingly desperate for any crumb of attention.In just the last couple months, I’ve personally gotten dozens of what I can only call desperation notifications. Push alerts from apps that don’t really need anything, but would really like it if I gave them some attention anyway. These include, but are not nearly limited to, the following:The Disney+ app let me know that because I watched The Simpsons, I might be interested in watching The Simpsons Movie (which I also recently watched).Discord informed me that someone in a server I'm also in updated their status, which is, I guess, a thing you can do in Discord.Venmo would like me to know I can fund my Kalshi account with my Venmo balance. (I do not and will never have a Kalshi account.)Reddit began sending push alerts for news stories from communities I wasn’t subscribed to and had never visited.Duet sent an aggressive half-dozen notifications within 15 minutes of closing the app, including multiple alerts that read “She just likes you.” Which is a surprisingly exasperated tone for a dating app.GrubHub asked me if I wanted to order food, precisely five minutes after I ordered food.Some of these are obviously just advertisements disguised as alerts—its own annoying problem—but just as many seem to be little more than a reminder that an app exists. And if you could please open the app and boost its engagement numbers, that would be great.Are app notifications really getting worse? Account Settings > Manage notifications to find a lengthy list of possible alerts you can receive. That’s already pretty buried, but if you sign into the app with multiple accounts, you’ll need to go through this process for each account you’re signed into. Otherwise, notifications you turned off for one account might still pop up via another.Most apps aren’t quite this chaotic, but it can still be annoying to dig through all the tedious menus. In some cases, this might be your only option, though. On Android, Reddit only has one notification category using the previous method, meaning you can only turn all notifications on or off at once. So, if you’re not finding the tools you need to selectively mute certain alerts in the OS-level settings, it might be worth digging through the app’s menus.When all else fails, use third-party toolsIt shouldn’t really be necessary to install an app just to get other apps to shut up, but if we must, then we must. BuzzKill, for Android, is a simple $4 app that gives you more robust tools to filter, manage, or suppress notifications than any of the built-in notification management settings.What sets BuzzKill apart is that, on top of filtering notifications by which app is sending them, it can also filter alerts by things like words they contain, whether they have an image attached, or whether they’re part of a group chat. So, if you want to keep getting news alerts, but you’re just sick of hearing about that one guy who’s always in the headlines for some reason, you can selectively filter those out.Unfortunately, this one’s likely to stay Android only, as iOS generally keeps apps in tighter sandboxes. BuzzKill needs to be able to read notifications from other apps in order to filter them, and that’s not something iOS generally allows apps to do. So, if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, you’ll have to stick with built-in tools for now.More broadly, it also can’t hurt to let app developers know when you’re annoyed by their incessant pings. Companies might try to boost their engagement by testing how much they can poke your attention span before you turn them off (or uninstall the app) entirely. But turning off unnecessary alerts can send a signal that they’ve gone too far in the wrong direction. Sending feedback reports, where possible, can potentially send an even stronger signal.