It's time for a hard reset on notifications | Hacker News Reader

It's time for a hard reset on notifications

theverge.com

10 pointsCharlesW7 comments

The real problem is for non-technical users who don't know about all the settings, and view their notifications as "tasks" they must complete. This isn't dissimilar from unsubscribing from emails.

The two solution proposals in this article already exist though. (1) You can swipe notifications to the left, tap "options", and turn them off or modify settings - a Tinder-like experience. (2) Apple requires that developers ask users whether they want notifications or not before they can send a user notifications - so unless the user turns them on, they won't get notifications.

Most of the dark UX practices come from the app developers themselves, who choose to spam their customers with batches of notifs without building in transparent opt-out features. Products like Braze make this more prominent.

Frankly this is one of the reasons I prefer using web sites over apps.

Notifications on iOS are awful. I really want certain kinds of notifications (specifically calendar appointments) to bug me until I acknowledge them. Instead, they trigger once, and if I happen to be off in deep concentration on a programming issue, I miss them entirely. Everything else I tend to disable, but it's a huge disconnect between how I think something should work and what actually happens in the real world.

Meanwhile I get a notification right after paying for something using NFC. Why??? This makes no sense.

> My second proposal — and this is a wild one — is that promotional notifications should just not be allowed. Or you can opt in to them if you desperately want to hear from the Starbucks app every single day, but you should have to go out of your way to do that and should not be the default behavior when you choose “allow notifications.” Just an idea!

Yep, this is my biggest complaint. I don’t want offers from Uber/Doordash/etc but I do want notifications of where my driver/food is, there is no middle ground in most apps. It’s all or nothing. I’d settle for a third party filtering app/service but that’s also a privacy nightmare.

In addition I’d love to be able to set up DnD on a fine grained level. I don’t want and all or nothing for something like discord. I’d like to let specific people through while ignoring channel notifications. I know this can sort of be done inside Discord/Slack/etc but I really don’t want to have to manage it in so many places.

Yea, I pretty much turned off notifications off across the board. It's gotten to a point where I don't want anything pushed to me, only pull, because there is no granularity in notification systems.

I do this, too. Push notifications were a decent idea that has an excellent use case, but are abused so heavily as to ruin their utility.

True. Notifications are a plague.

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