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Comment by schaunwheeler | Hacker News Reader

Lot of strong feelings here about push notifications :) I think it's worth pointing out that (1) there are many people out there who find push notifications useful or even desirable, and (2) push notifications don't need to suck. Most push notification are annoying nudges because tools that allow companies to send notifications only allow mindless mass blasts with maybe a bit of only-slightly-less-mindless segmentation scattered in. There are better ways to do it. I'm helping build one of those ways (aampe.com), but my point is that we should distinguish between the current state of the technology and the potential of the technology to meet a valid need.

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Lots of people find email "useful or even desirable". Same with SMS, phone calls, mail/letters.

All have been abused by "marketing" to the point where they almost became or become useless. In some cases, workarounds were found so we can continue living our lives without spammers.

I suppose it's inevitable that push notifications are no different. But the argument is still unconvincing.

Why should we assume that the way SMS, phones, mail, notifications and other channels have been handled in the past is the way they must always be handled? I work with a lot of those marketers. It's not like they're sitting in front of Braze in a black top-hat, twirling a curly mustache with their fingers, and saying "heh heh heh, how I can annoy all of my users today?" They hate that there isn't a better way to reach people. There are better ways - I know because I'm building one of them and can see how it reaches people when they want, about what they want, and as frequently as they want, and how the engagement and purchase rates are way higher for those individualized messages than they are for dumb blast messages.

It's not inevitable that a tool with a glaring technical flaw must always have that technical flaw. Technical flaws can be fixed.

> Most push notification are annoying nudges because tools that allow companies to send notifications only allow mindless mass blasts

How hard is it to accept that for a lot of this stuff, there is literally nobody that wants to recieve it. It's fly-tipping your junk into millions of people's gardens in the hope that 0.001% of them see it and it reminds them of something they had meant to do already... The tech you are talking about almost certainly raises this to an amazing 0.0012%, by the looks of it it primarily does this by changing around the composition of the trash heap occasionally.

Until you invent telepathy, you will never be able to know who those vanishingly few people where recieving useless junk would remind them of something are

It feels like you're assuming a traditional marketing approach to "blasting" messages and hoping they stick. That's how most marketing tools work, but it's not how all marketing tools work, and I think it's a mistake to treat an implementation flaw as an indicator that a technology isn't actually desirable. It's not desirable in its current form. That doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

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