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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

> Push messages can be particularly useful for applications that need to deliver timely, relevant information to their users, such as news or sports apps, or for e-commerce websites that want to send users notifications about special offers or sales.

Sure, they have their uses… but web sites will send far more notifications than anyone wants to receive. People would enjoy a drinking fountain but get a fire hose.

I don’t even think about it. I just click “no” (and curse under my breath for even making me do that) and move on.

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I’ve never understood why the push notification permission doesn’t require a click to activate. Many other intrusive things (e.g. playing a video) do. Google have even gone down a long winded path of disabling the prompt for sites that have low acceptances rates which seems like a very over complicated solution.

Allowing it on page load has totally soured users on what could be a really useful tool. Sometimes I absolutely would like to receive notifications from a service without having to install an entire native app for it. Unfortunately that’s counter to the way Apple have implemented web push, requiring a Home Screen install before you’re able to use it.

On iOS push notifications are gated behind Web Clips[0]. You can only ask for notification permissions if the user has pinned your webapp to the homescreen. This seems like a perfect way to deal with all the spammy notification asks.

[0] What iOS calls a "progressive web app"

To me it’s not ideal. I can imagine wanting a notification from an app I don’t want to install to my home screen and I wish it were possible.

I know it’s not exactly what you have in mind, but with the App Library screen you can have an app installed yet not on any Home Screen. It’s just with the rest of your apps in there.

Apple is between a rock and a hard place with your request. What you want would require another way to delete a web app from your notification list. Right now they went with the simplest method: just use the way the native apps do it.

Actually Web Clips are an exception: you cannot have it in App Library. It's either on your home screen or deleted.

I feel like Firefox has done a good job moving the prompt to an unobtrusive part of the address bar and only really drawing attention to it after an interaction on a page occurred.

My impression is that Edge is just like iOS requiring you to "pin" a site somewhere (to bookmarks, to the start menu, to the desktop, to the taskbar, whatever) before prompting for notifications.

Whenever I get prompted to allow them from a website, my immediate thought is "why would they ever think I'd want this?"

Not all web apps spam notifications. I think we are all thinking of notifications in the context of what typical websites typically do but this is all dependent on what the web app/developer does (eg. if HN had a push notifications, wouldn't it be nice to know when you receive a reply to your comment? ... plus a "Notifications Settings" page to set what type of notifications HN can send, notifications about a certain topic or domain on the front page, etc?)

Uber Eats and Drizzly spam my notifications (I know Android has very detailed/overly complex IMO way of managing app notification channels) but because they are native apps we don't complain.

HNNotify.io (YC S23) anyone?

I love how detailed the notification management on Android can be

> Not all web apps spam notifications

Yes. I’ll bet there are many well-behaved web apps, with well-considered notifications and concise and simple options so that users get everything they want and little they don’t.

They are downed out by the firehose too.

firehose? as in other websites the user has allowed notifications for that are "bad" actors?

> if HN had a push notifications, wouldn't it be nice to know when you receive a reply to your comment?

Not via a push notification, no.

via what then?

Email would be my preference. That way, I can have it be autosorted and let my email client do any special processing I want, including notifications if that's desirable.

To be fair, focus mode now semi-effectively "autosorts" with preferred handling per cell in a matrix of source x modality.

I had to search for "focus mode" to learn what you were referring to, so forgive me if my understanding is incorrect. Isn't that a Win 11 thing? It looks like a kind of do-not-disturb mode?

How does that intersect with browser push notifications? Another advantage of email notifications is that the email notifications won't go away if I don't pay attention to them for a long while.

In any case, I don't use Windows except at work, where this wouldn't be an issue anyway.

There are very few websites that I love and might trust to not abuse notifications, and HN is probably one of them. Still, I only want an inbox or page showing unread messages that I can check at my own initiative rather than something that will pop-up or otherwise try to get my attention when I'm clearly choosing to look at or do something else. Only my wife and maybe my boss should be able to do that.

I would NOT want to get a notification if somebody replied to my comment on HN. I want a small, unoptrusive icon on HN that shows the exact number of replies that I haven't read and that I can click on when I have time.

There is far too much already that bings, bangs, jumps and try to get my attention.

They might know you probably won't want it, but they're hoping you'll click yes or accept without thinking, haha

I suspect that this is the real answer.

You can deny push notifications by default in your browser settings and never be prompted again. They can still be manually allowed on the sites where you actually want them. Same goes for location requests and other "site settings".

more like people want some eye drops of notifications, they get niagara falls.

everyone is competing for your attention.

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