Most notifications earned a disinterested glance from me, and I ended up swiping them away, too lazy to change settings. But there was one type of notification that got my full attention every time: an alert from Reddit reminding me that I had a new message. Not a short and snappy message like the “What’s up?” casually sent by my friends—rather, it was almost always a long, carefully thought-out letter amounting to at least a thousand words.