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Comment by dr_kiszonka | Hacker News Reader

Tangent: do web push notifications work?

A lot of websites ask if I want to be notified via a web push, which I personally find very annoying and have never tried it. But perhaps people (consumers/users and sellers/creators) find them useful?

Bonus question: are you subscribed to any web push notifications? Which ones and why do you like web push vs. a newsletter or RSS?

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A data point: Amazon has Amazon Smile, where 0.5% of your purchase price will be donated to a charity of your choice. You use it on web by going to smile.Amazon.com.

On the app, though, you can enable it… but only if you enable pushes to your phone. So Amazon has determined that they work well enough to be worth half a percent of e-commerce revenue.

I realize this may be a pain for some, but doing a force quit on the amazon app (once you're done) will stop the notifications.

I believe they are intended to support effective webapps but in practice are just used to confuse and abuse non-techy users that suddenly get 100s of notifications for random websites which they don't know how to turn off. Same as notifications from all the spam addiction-based-and-not-actually-fun free-to-play apps.

IMO a huge part of the problem for users is not really knowing what they're agreeing to since you don't really know what notifications you're going to get until they're turned on.

I guess many people hate them, but subscribe without thinking about it and don't know how to unsubscribe. For the websites I would expect them to be quite useful, because they will get a lot of extra traffic and returning customers. Even if people don't like the volume of notifications, they will still click on them if the headline sounds interesting enough.

Bonus answer: I think they are quite useful for web applications (mail, calendars, slack etc) and I usually prefer enabling notifications to installing a native client.

Yep, my MIL had accidentally subscribed to several, and when I next saw her laptop, the notifications came in all the way up the right side and were pretty disruptive.

My grandmother thought her computer had a bunch of viruses because of how Windows 10 showed them.

Bonus comment: excellent point about web app notifications! I do use calendar notifications because they are very useful.

I have never allowed any notifications.

Me neither. IHMO the best option is to check "Block new requests asking to allow notifications" in Firefox (Settings -> Privacy -> Notifications -> Settings).

I have enabled web push notifications for a few sites, specifically Slack and Help Lightning. But those are both communication tools where I often use a browser instead of a native app and want immediate message notifications.

I have never, nor would I ever enable web push notifications for any sort of marketing or newsletters. I am still a huge RSS reader fan, and use imapfilter to automatically format and send certain emails directly to my RSS service (freshrss) [1].

I am big on zero-inbox, so I _hate_ having non important stuff in there. But for some reason, having a backlog of RSS feeds doesn't bother me! I wonder if part of it is that I find mobile email clients and web email clients so limiting when it comes to filtering and managing messages/threads.

[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...

I find the ones on lichess quite useful. As for whether they work for ads, I'm not sure, IIRC you'll need to have your browser open or at least running in the background to get push notifications, so my hunch is that they wouldn't be good for that.

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