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Comment by vhiremath4 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who has basically disabled all notifications at this point? Even if I turned them on for a select few apps I would actually potentially want them for (Slack, email, Instagram), there is so much noise in those apps and I can’t differentiate between what I actually want:

“send me Slack notifications if it seems urgent from my boss or team”

“send me email notifications if it’s from a top enterprise customer”

“send me Instagram DMs only if it’s from someone I’m interested in dating”

^ These are the kinds of notifications I would want to hit the push threshold but there’s no way to do that. Maybe a useful application of LLMs?

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Nope, I have very few notifications allowed on my personal devices. Basically Messages/SMS and phone. And those are set to vibrate/visual, no sound.

Work laptop also has email and Slack visuals, no sound.

And I use Focus/Sleep to eliminate all (except wife/kid/parents) notifications from 9pm to 7am.

Edit - I can think of only 2-3 apps that send push notifications and they're mostly fitness related. The notifications are generally of the type "your workout was synced" and the only reason I leave these up is I use 3-4 apps and when they don't sync, I want to manually force a re-sync. None send random "we've updated a thing!" messages (and if they did, I disable the notifications).

I absolutely do NOT want random, unscheduled notifications that aren't directly related to something I did/am doing.

I don't understand how it's acceptable for apps like Uber or DoorDash to deliver to me an unprompted ad, pushed into my notifications center. It's always something like "10% off your order for the next day!" or "Try this new pass thing!".

Firstly, that's a guaranteed way for me to disable all notifications from the app, if not uninstall it. Secondly, how is that not a violation of some sort of Apple Developer Guideline? I wish they'd crack down on that sort of thing.

Absolutely unacceptable. Apps that abuse notifications to run ads get a one-star review and uninstalled. Lyft, Gig, Lime, Instagram, Migraine Buddy—dead to me.

And simply revoking permissions isn’t a solution; the core problem is that the app would even try to abuse its privileges. Imagine being content with someone trying to come though your door just because you’ve turned the deadbolt. Their behavior is still unacceptable.

Two of these don't need any machine learning; they just needs more information to be encoded in the notifications, and more comprehensive filtering to be built into the notification subsystem. Your second and third conditions just require the ability to build contact groups that get higher priority for notifications (and, of course, an indication within the notification of who the sender is).

The "urgent" part of the first is obviously somewhat more complicated, but the "from my boss or team" is also just a contact group. I don't use Slack, so I am unfamiliar with its specific capabilities, but if it gave the ability to mark a message as "urgent", that could be transferred through to the notification, and allow additional filtering on it. Alternatively, I suspect that it already allows (for whatever the Slack equivalent of the "server owner" is) for the creation of arbitrary channels; if your team created an "urgent issues" channel, the channel information could easily be encoded into notification metadata to allow filtering on.

Notifications are the bane of my existence. Every app, desktop, mobile, website, professional tool, doesn't matter. They ALL have some kind of prompt. Ad, yes/no, another yes/no, are you sure, some pop-up, hey can I have your email, hey look over here, hey my setInterval() ran out. I feel like I live in a jungle of pop-ups and I, the user with a digital machete, must cut my way towards my computing goal.

I disabled all notifications but I selectively enabled them on some websites. For example I don't want to install discord or telegram apps, because they live in my browser just fine. But I can't really use them without notifications, that's essential feature. Right now I'm talking about desktop, but I'll be very happy to purge them from my iPhone.

Discord is interesting to see because I find the app experience way better. I just silence notifications/no push/no banner everything. I have to be tagged directly for it to alert me

> But I can't really use them without notifications, that's essential feature.

I use Discord extensively and exclusively within the browser, and I have push notifications disabled. I just keep it in a pinned tab, and whenever I have a notification it just puts a little red dot on the Discord tab's icon. I do aggressively mute channels and servers to keep it manageable, though.

One way I filter emails is by having multiple folders. I only get notified for the Inbox folder. Most other emails are filtered by title or email. I also hit the spam button too much, so I rarely get a bad notification.

I’ve left a few in banner mode, but nothing is configured to be intrusive. Only messages from my wife vibrate. Most apps aren’t even allows banners. But my philosophy is if it’s an emergency use a synchronous mode like calling me. If it’s not, I’ll tend to it as I can. For better or worse I check my phone often enough that asynchronous modes like messages or email or whatever get processed in short enough order.

Focus modes in iOS are helpful but I just found there’s no time when I need everything vibrating to tell me random information that I could poll.

> Am I the only one who has basically disabled all notifications at this point

Nope. I disable all notifications as well. The small handful of somewhat useful ones aren't worth the annoying and distracting cascade of completely worthless ones.

I've turned all notifications (os, app, browser) off on all devices. They're just too distracting. It also helps me be more purposeful about how I interact with the machine.

Its become a noisy world.

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