My theory would be that that:

* "disturbable by default" is a carry-over from landline-only time

* calls where rarer in landline-only time because they (sometimes) cost _money_

* calls where rarer in particular times (eg late at night) because of a social norm

* calls in the middle of the day where probably rarer, but also much easier to ignore because you were not at home and your phone simply run in the void

* calls were mostly done by human beings

Now, the "phone calls from a human being who respects social norms or that I simply never hear" have been replaced by "automated notifications from bots in a piece of plastic that's constantly in my pocket, or text messages from people that expects me to be reachable at any time."

So, I would argue that "disturb" was always the default mode, but the disturbance is now high enough that we might want to reconsider.

Although, the old rules like "don't call me after 11pm unless it's an emergency" would be hard to translate to "don't text me after 11pm unless it's an emergency even though it's currently our only way to communicate because lockdown" ;)

Also 'long distance' was a cost that minimized the blast radius of callers. They also couldn't buy targeted call lists which I presume exist now with low cost and effort.

Yeah, but if you called after 9pm you had to have a damn good reason or you’d get a lecture about “what hour it is”.

My father had a different dictionary if the reason was not damn good, like some one in medical emergency.

But people generally had the good manners not to call in the middle of the night, unless it was an emergency.

Do people nowadays call others in the middle of the night?

I know it will not work for everyone but I've setup alerts so almost nothing makes a sound on the phone, even with DnD off.

Some people are just set up differently. I have to mute my phone at night because of this with one person in mind. I tend to do that anyway but there are certain people I'd like to be able to contact me then if there's an emergency. Unfortunately there isn't a straightforward way to allow just them to cause ringng on my phone either.

This person just doesn't get it either. When we were in school they'd walk into my dorm room at about 3 in the morning too if I didn't lock it

I really haven't received any non-emergency calls at midnight for years. App notifications, on the other hand..., uh.

I just set my phone to DnD with calls allowed and notifications silenced, and it works wonders. Maybe it should be the default?

That's exactly what I think. I shouldn't have to be configuring stuff to not be disturbed. That should be the default. Then let me configure under what circumstances I want to waken up, like this person is calling, the server went down, etc.

Maybe that's what designers/developers should consider when working on notifications: this notification will potentially wake up someone, let's not do it unless they explicitly asked us to wake them up if this happened.

Yep, someone designed my phone to vibrate if it runs out of battery and needs to shut down. Wonderful in the middle of the night. No way to disable it.

Haha hilarious. I'm sorry about it, but this is a great example of what I'm talking about

The friendly people from Windows Technical Department keep calling me at various times of the day and night to tell me about the malware I supposedly have on my computer. I now ignore all calls unless I know the number or am expecting a call from a doctor or similar.

Generally no. But we had former presidents that tweet at 3am, does that count?