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Comment by sdfjkl | Hacker News Reader

That's what RSS is for, no? Keeps the subscription under your control, you don't have to share anything with anyone, you can unsubscribe easily and it's trivial to anonymize through a reader that caches/proxies the requests.

Perfect for the end user. Not so perfect for the spam industry, of course, but whenever those guys get to decide how something on the internet should work it always turns ugly, so that really has to stop.

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To turn it off in Firefox' about:config, switch both to False:

   dom.webnotifications.serviceworker.enabled
   dom.webnotifications.enabled

Thank you for that, I keep getting annoyed by that and keep forgetting to look up how to disable that. I finally just disabled it.

> That's what RSS is for, no?

> Perfect for the end user

Really? Do you genuinely believe that RSS Readers are widely used? Do you really think that the average non-technical user can and/or is willing to use RSS software, let alone configure a proxy? Do you even think they care?

Personal opinion: I love RSS feeds, but to think that it is somehow superior to notifications for the average user is silly.

Why would you need to configure a proxy? When I used to read more blogs, I would just click the RSS feed icon in the URL bar, then it would generate a little bookmark folder thing in Firefox and blog entries would show up there. Seemed pretty simple at the time...

Notifications can do a lot more than just tell you when new content was posted. Think of, well, just about anything that an app notification does. New message, new e-mail, etc etc

No! I hate the idea of each individual app being able to instantly notify me of new content! I want all of my notifications in one indistinguishable place, outside the context of it's source! It's the perfect interface! /s

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