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Comment by Google234 | Hacker News Reader

I’m the same as the the users of Firefox who deny 99% of notifications https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti...

We are the the 99%

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99% of notification requests being blocked is not the same as 99% of users blocking notifications. If every user visits 100 sites and accepts notifications from one of them, then 100% of users actually want notifications despite 99% of requests being denied.

I'm not defending stupid notification popups from some website you'll only ever visit once. Those are annoying. I'm saying you can't tell what users want unless you specifically measure exactly that. Maybe you're right and 99% of users don't want notifications, but that's not what your cited numbers show. You're drawing a conclusion from the data that isn't there.

I would imagine that 99% of people wouldn’t be happy with a service that is 99% spam.

Again though you're making assumptions that the data can't back up. If a site asks to send me notifications and I say no that doesn't make the notifications spam. That just means I don't want to see them for some reason.

And besides, for something to be spam you need to actually see it. In the case of notifications if you deny the permission on a site you don't see the notifications. That's the perfect spam filter. Imagine a world where people could only send you email if you explicitly said you accepted it from them. Or if robocallers could only call you if you agreed first. Spam would be over. There would be no spam. That sounds fantastic.

Email _is_ 99% spam. That doesn't mean that email isn't useful, though.

Somehow, by the time it reaches any of my multiple inboxes it’s not 99% spam

For me on Android Firefox website push notifications don't even work. I thought this was by design. Am I doing something wrong? There's a couple of sites where I really do want this.

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