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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Browsing the web today is like visiting a third world city where you are always being stopped by beggars.

The demand for me to subscribe to notifications is 1000x more than my supply of time to attend to them.

I'm sure there are reasons notifications are useful. I like to get one when a 20 minute compilation is over or when something I posted to HN has dropped off the "new" page and won't compete with my next posting.

The fact though is I am already assaulted with spam, even reputable brands want to send me multiple emails a day even though there is no way I am going to engage them that frequently.

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I understand how you feel definitely. I am a person with a poor memory and multiple Gmail accounts... So sometimes I open up my "All Inboxes" folder in the gmail app to discover that I've given the same website multiple addresses and they've sent out three emails to each :(.

With the click notifications on my phone though, I tend to live and die by them (again, poor memory). I use a lot of calendar and scheduling apps, and in that case the design of the notifications is actually really important to me

I'm the same way, without the notifications I might forget I have certain applications installed at all... At the same time, those tedious over notifications sometimes motivate me to uninstall junk apps.

Those are all really excellent points and part of why I thought the article might be interesting to some of the developers here on Hacker News. A colleague of mine made an interesting point recently. They mentioned that it seems like the companies are really pushing hard on the developers on their teams to build these notifications, and then for marketing to to pile them on in mass. Then the folks who tend to be the most irritated by receiving this onslaught of notifications are other developers working on similar things for their company and not super psyched about it.

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