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Comment by etblg | Hacker News Reader

I did the same thing years ago and have never regretted it. I really just hate my phone randomly vibrating and taking my attention over some dumb notification I don't really care about -- or feeling ghost vibrations in my pocket where I have to keep pulling out my phone to see if it was a notification or my imagination.

Turns out nothing is really that time critical that it can't wait until the next time I check my phone, which is usually on a surface in front of me anyway.

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You can generally turn off notifications. A lot of people want to be reached for any number of reasons with respect to family members etc.

On iOS you can set Favorite contacts and then allow them to call you despite Do Not Disturb being active.

Also if the same number calls you 3 times in 5 minutes, it will ring through

I turned off the equivalent setting in Android because spammers will call multiple times in quick succession.

A great feature, Android has this also

The problem is that it’s not necessarily your contact that is trying to contact you with respect to a family member etc.

You can also just say "No" when an app asks to send notifications. People don't seem to realise that you have complete control over when your phone dings for your attention.

A dark pattern some apps used is they use their own notification prompt first, and then the system one. The system won't reprompt if you deny it, so I tell the app "Yes", to then say "No" to iOS. This mostly does a good job of stopping the nagging.

There are a lot of applications that use the same notification channel for important things (like credit card transactions) and meaningless spam (and changing banks is not always possible for reasons outside of our control). The channels were supposed to solve this problem, but Google is not enforcing the "purity" of their usage afaik.

And that’s some of the problem. I don’t consider a random credit card transaction that I may make multiple times a day terribly important unless it’s over $1K or whatever.

In my experience, I've not found an app that sends a mix of both genuinely useful and spam notifications.

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