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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

Most of the time the app is pushing them on you for engagement (youtube: LOOK NEW VIDEO!). But for important chats with important people, I sometimes want a notification when they send me a message.

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I don't even have it for chat. It's insane to me that you'd let your attention be stolen away that easily at any given moment (don't understand how people get deep hard work done when that's a constant risk).

It's simple really, it doesn't steal my attention away, I can just brush them off. Not everybody is the same.

Pretty much every platform with notifications supports a "do not disturb" mode for just such occasions.

If someone needs to contact me urgently, they should call me.

I never treat text communications as real-time communications, and I'm not about to start now.

Same here, but we are not everybody and the world needs to implement features for people other than us as well as those we want.

Yeah: I largely think phone calls are stupid, have been using text communication since I was a kid 30 years ago--on BBS systems originally!--and you have no hope of reaching me in a timely manner if you call me... but I'm not going to use that as a reason to make it harder for other people to use phone calls if they want them, even if I see no reason for synchronous communication to exist: you do you... but you also have to let me do me or you frankly don't deserve to be able to do you. "I don't find this useful" is only a reason to prevent other people from being able to have the feature if you are an authoritarian asshole, plain and simple :/. If you don't like aspects of feature, you know what? You should get to turn it off... and, it turns out, you can.

> on BBS systems originally!

I'll never forget being awoken because someone felt the need to page the SysOp at 2 AM on the Compaq laptop running my BBS in my closet.

With PWA you could have a VoIP service as a web app that notifies you if someone uses it to call you.

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