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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> But with pushes, we have to guess what the customer might be interested in given triggers such as events, promotional offers

No, you don't have to guess. You can correctly know that the answer is "no". If you're going to blatantly send unwanted marketing to the user, at least be honest with yourself and your audience about it.

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I think what they really meant there was

> But with pushes, we have to guess what is the upper limit of unwanted marketing the customer will tolerate

For me, that limit is “none”, I have stopped paying money to several services I used regularly the first time the mobile app gave me an unsolicited notification.

The upper limit is still zero.

No. Most customers will tolerate quote a lot of this form of advertising just like other forms. Enough to make it profitable to spend significant effort on it.

Whether customers will tolerate it has no bearing on whether it is acceptable to bake an antifeature into an application.

In your opinion. In marketers' or app developers' opinions, it continues to make them more money so that's what they'll do, regardless of whether a small minority of consumers complain about it. Of the people I know, only technical people have turned off notifications, most average users simply have long lists of notifications on their phone, that they may or may not look at, ironically making the value of each notification from some random app a lot less.

Sometimes I feel like a space alien: I didn't watch an add since 2008 when I divorced and didn't need a TV any more.

I'd rather not use a service than to get adds. The day YouTube stops me from using an adblocker I'm going to have a lot of free time on my hands!

Depends. We had a system that someone would favourite a product they are interested in, and when it went on a meaningful discount (20% or more) we would send them a notification letting them know. This had pretty good engagement compared to just shooting notifications out.

If a user specifically uses a feature that asks for notifications about a product, then you're just doing what the user asked you to do. The problem comes in when sending such notifications without them being requested by the user, which includes if the user "favorited" a product but that "favorite" operation had nothing to do with requesting promotions of that product. ("This is a thing I like" is not an invitation for spam about buying it; "Help me buy this" is an invitation for desired messages about buying it.)

I'd say its a grey area in our case. The user isn't using a "tell me when discounts happen" feature, but rather a favourites feature where some of our marketing said to favourite things to get a discount.

Another instance but via notification was that someone would lose their product if they didn't complete the transaction (24 hours notice). This wasn't a lie - we reserved inventory for 24 hours for a buyer as it was a unique product. Versus something like booking which is eternally telling me someone else is about to reserve the room I'm considering renting.

> The user isn't using a "tell me when discounts happen" feature

Then that's a plain abuse of push notifications, in my view. If the user didn't ask for marketing messages, they shouldn't be pushed.

I'm in Europe. They have to tell us they want marketing messages otherwise its against the regulations and would result in fines. We followed those rules!

But but our notification policy is just “Do you want notifications, including security alerts, new messages, emergency information about your account, and promotional messages and advertisements, and you agree that we can sell all your data”?

There’s literally no way we could break that down! How can we guess what the user wants when they REFUSE to tell us! I guess we better just leave it so they can opt out if they successfully navigate all 6 toggles, but if they do that we better just flag their account for suspicious activity because I don’t know why anybody would ever opt out. Seems suspicious to me.

And this is why pretty much none of my apps are allowed to send notifications. At all. Too many poisoned apples in the barrel and I just have lost my trust for the lot of them

yeah, I was like "you check the user's notification settings, right? right?"

The problem starts with low opt-in rates. The assumption becomes the low response was due to the user not understanding how to opt-in.

Or turn that around: the service was providing insufficient value for the user to bother looking at how to opt in for their notifications.

By that same logic the present state can be described as most users not knowing how to opt-out which is predatory.

Given the history of online advertising it can readily be inferred that ads do not provide enough value for almost any user to want to opt-in.

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