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Comment by left-struck | Hacker News Reader

Idk why more people don’t do what I do. I call it notification hygiene, or maybe attention hygiene. If an app has a legitimate reason for notifying me, like it’s a messaging app and a human being has messaged me, then the app gets to notify me, otherwise it does not. The first time an app shows me a notification that is useless to me it gets deleted from my phone if I’m not using it anymore. On the spot. Drop everything I’m doing and delete the app. If I am still using the app I disable notifications for it. I get almost no notifications that aren’t people messaging me.

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I was an Audible subscriber for like five years when they started spamming my notifications with ads. I unsubscribed on the spot and haven't looked back. I couldn't believe it, I had probably given them $1000 by that point but apparently that wasn't good enough. Even if you give a company a significant amount of money they'll still do everything they can to squeeze even more money out of you.

Cant do that with my banking app, payment app or government apps :(. Unfortunately where I live almost everything requires a phone.

You can’t turn off the notifications?

To be clear I wouldn’t delete my banking app if it showed me a marketing notification, I would go into the app and turn off that kind of notification. I have notifications turned on for my banking app because of 2FA and transaction notifications. In the past I was actually able to stop a fraudulent transaction within minutes because of a transaction notification so I value them.

you can't selectively turn off junk notifications from apps that you need notifications from.. i want to use the peets app to know when my coffees ready but it spams me with pumpkin spice latte deals..

I think this is something I genuinely differ on to most people. If an app doesn’t allow me to selectively choose the notifications then I don’t allow it to notify me. I put a really high value on my attention and I don’t consider that ok behaviour from an app. If I miss something because I don’t get notifications then that’s too bad, the value of not being interrupted is so much higher.

I feel similarly. I hunt for the Unsubscribe button to every email I don’t want and/or mark it spam in my mail app. It makes a real difference after a while.

Unfortunately, companies know most people aren’t like us so they keep pumping out the crap.

Contact the associated app store. Those should be labeled differently and not misused.

> you can't selectively turn off junk notifications from apps that you need notifications from

You can't if it's a junk app. Many reputable apps today have properly described notification channels and you can turn them off selectively (under android at least). That's what I did for my banking and several other apps. Every "marketing" channel was turned off.

My banking app has pretty fined-tuned control over notifications. They also support ulterior notifs, like email and SMS.

Android kindly has notification channels. Apps can setup whatever categories they want & users can turn individual channels on and off as they like.

Alas it seems like few apps have it implemented. Hiss boo. Wish this was available of Web Push.

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