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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

Starbucks is like this. They deliberately bundle together "Promotions & Order Status" to make sure you receive their junk.

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Sounds like a good reason to give your business to someone else

This is the answer. Money talks, so give your money to businesses that earn it.

"But it's not as convenient!" I hear some yell. Then it's obviously not enough of a bother to you, so just suck it up and deal with their bad behavior.

Because until you take your money elsewhere, nothing will change. And why should it? They obviously haven't crossed a line for enough people. Which means it'll just get worse.

Yeah when I hear "it's not convenient" what I actually hear is "I'm too lazy for that"

Why do you even need a Starbucks app in the first place? Get a physical loyalty card.

Or, you know, have coffee at home

> Or, you know, have coffee at home

Nescafe Gold Instant coffee. Coffee is coffee, and this one tastes better than Starbucks'

Just use Apple Pay. It’s convenient and anonymous.

This path doesn’t seem to work very well.

Society’s stated preference is things like healthy food, paying as opposed to ads (not being the product), and no notifications.

Society’s revealed preference is McDonald’s, watching YouTube ads, and letting apps send whatever notifications they want to.

In general people care about the trade offs between cost and convenience, between cost and style, and not at all about anything so mundane as value, privacy, or peace of mind.

It's a common issue in America. The Game book basically already discussed this with dating. That stated preferences are total junk for significant portions of humanity. They say they want "idea" but really want, "pretend to believe in 'idea', while acting the horrible way you actually respond to."

Most of America is a "bait and switch" or a "rug pull." This article basically talks about those issues with workers. [1] America sayssss "work hard, be loyal, be honest, be virtuous" how America acts is "Reward lazy humans, reward dishonesty / backstabbing, reward vice (pride, lust, greed are pretty much America)."

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221... Stanley, Matthew L., Christopher B. Neck, and Christopher P. Neck. "Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 106 (2023): 104442.

> Society’s revealed preference is McDonald’s

Without government restrictions, is society's revealed preference also widespread use of hard drugs?

Ever since opium wars, unadressed drug use was a problem that required active internevtion.

Active interventions gave us war on drugs with hundreds of thousands of civilians dead (or rather millions if you count things like oxycontin -> fentanyl and other similar side effects), tens if not hundreds of millions of lives fucked up, and seeing a superpower losing a war with... some chemicals. No thank you

So the answer to the wrong intervention is no intervention at all?

Sure, or we could make a law which prevents this kind of mixing of notifications.

I, as a consumer would appreciate this.

Find me a business that doesn't do such shenanigans?

I bought some Camper shoes the other week and got zero spam so far

So does Uber (+ eats); I don’t want deals or vouchers, I don’t want to sign up to your subscription service, I only want to know when the car is arriving.

Instagram I had to disable from notifications entirely, so now I miss messages from friends frequently, because the app bombards you with so much unrelated junk.

I suspect these companies know this, they know we don’t want spurious notifications, but they abuse whatever notification policies the OS provides in order to deliver you them anyways.

For Uber and UberEats, turns out you actually can disable marketing notifications, under the communication settings, it's just hidden away.

Funny, I had turned off notifications for UberEats exactly due to this.

You can't actually manage these notifications until re-opening the door, re-enabling them.

There are currently six categories in here. Who wants to take bets until these shift, nullifying the point?

Yes, and websites know that we don't want video advertisements playing everywhere on the screen, but it doesn't matter because we're the product, not the customer.

I use Uber all the time and having notifications disabled is fine.

I use a screenshot of the payment barcode from the Starbucks app when I’m in the store to pay. I do not want it on my phone. It seems to be constantly bombarding my wife’s phone with trivial prompts and notifications.

Why order using the phone anyway? Why give them that sweet sweet data?

I use Apple Pay exclusively at Starbucks. They haven’t a clue who I am.

PUMPKIN SPICE LATTE ON SALE NOWWW

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