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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the experimental and data-driven approach, is it really necessary? Just don't spam your users. There, done. If there's even the slightest hint of doubt that they might not want the notification, don't send it. If you only send notifications that users actually ask for you won't have this problem in the first place.

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We technies like to think that any and every notification/email/etc is annoying and is like spam. But non-technical users really don't work that way and may even WANT notifications.

Examples:

- My girlfriend keeps asking me to sign up for snail mail advertisements (e.g. discounts at local stores).

- When I was performing maintenance on my mother's laptop, I saw an annoying "daily offers" ad popup from her virus scanner. I immediately went for the "Don't show this again" checkbox, but my mother stopped me in my tracks. "Don't do that! Those daily offers are useful!"

It blew my mind.

If they want it then they'll say "yes" when you ask them if they want it. Much simpler than trying to determine the consequences of unsolicited messages.

Yeah, my experiences reflect this as well. Personally, I only opt-in to 2 retailer notifications. They both reliably send me offers which I deem valuable. Everything else is nothing short of a nuisance and I opt-out almost immediately. I get overly irritated about this sort of thing :)

My mind was just blown reading your comment, but now that you mention it, my friend's mom did something similar; she had over 500px tall of toolbars in IE (7, I think). I went to uninstall them because they were all just loaded with spam and banner ads, and nonsense search bars. It was unfuckingbelievable, like more than half of her screen, but she wouldn't let me uninstall them.

These are the people who watch home shopping channels,

What percentage of users actually ask developers for notifications? This submission highlights a fundamental problem with notifications on iOS: there are very few fine-grained settings for notifications and very little feedback for annoying notifications. If I find certain app notifications annoying, there's very little I can do past turning off notifications for that app.

Even if you send only non-commercial notifications to users who requested them they still may uninstall your app (or for email, report as spam.)

If you are in a very competitive market for user acquisition - mobile game, Uber, crowd based delivery service, etc - 1 or 2 percentage points in behavior can be a really damn big deal. 1 or 2% uninstalling your app every week is enough to kill your viral coefficient. It would have been enough to kill Facebook.

You are notch and you just made Minecraft? Probably doesn't matter.

Presumably the effect of notifications to at least some users is that they increase engagement. If you've got more users that start using your app after a notification who weren't previously using it, than stop using your app who were previously using it, then it's a win.

For myself, while I'm annoyed at notifications, they also work on me for the apps I care about. (For apps I don't care about, I wasn't using them anyway.)

I'm not disputing that it can be a win, I'm simply saying that more basic principles like "don't spam people" should override that.

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