all of the sudden new Android 8.1 started to display those little arrows next to every notification. Remember Windows 95 shortcuts? These look exactly the same.
As I understand, they mean “you can reply to that notification”. But the language is all wrong: if you put something next to the person avatar it’s supposed to reflect person status or some other property of that person. Here, it’s supposed to mean affordance for you. I’m also not sure why we needed these arrows when big “reply” buttons were already there under each notification.
Sadly, it’s really hard to ignore those arrows because they are all bright and foremost for some reason. Do you really think that fact that you can write a reply is more important than the picture of a person who wrote the message? Seriously?