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Comment by nateguchi | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam)

> Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push

Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.

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Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc.

Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.

And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.

Same for things like Uber.

I do want to know when a car is arriving.

I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.

Hi whstl,

Are you hungry? Open your Uber Eats app now for 10% off.

/this message sent through PalantirFinder -- from marketing and coupons to ordnance, we deliver everything!

I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…)

But I digress.

> I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages.

Uber may have that functionality, but a surprising number of other apps don't - for example Makro, Tops, and 7/11 Thailand, three very popular Thailand retailers, use notifications for when an order is out for delivery, about to arrive, etc. But they also send constant promotion notifications every day, even with audio alerts enabled.

We must, at some point surely, reach an inflection where even everyday people are sick of this shit and start smashing their phones right?

There has always been "unpluggers" [0] amongst technologists, but the vibes are bad and getting worse. I feel like that is getting more common between "normal" people I know, but maybe outside of my country town bubble its not happening.

I was thinking we're only one or two big influencers away from a cascade, but then the ultra-influencers are never really going to commit because its their livelyhood and saying throw your phone away is self-limiting on the viral aspect.

I guess we're just stuck under the boot.

^0 https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...

> We must, at some point surely, reach an inflection where even everyday people are sick of this shit and start smashing their phones right?

Never underestimate the ignorance of the average person…

I am talking about those people who consume content while ads blink around the content in a all four directions and they don‘t even actively notice.

Most people I know who are bombarded by worthless updates every minute either ignore them but don't bother to disable any or are glued to their phones anyway, so they are beyond help.

I wish Apple would force app developers to implement different "channels" for promotional notifications vs transactional - so that you can pick and choose which ones you want.

In-app notifications settings should do this if they are trustworthy.

The "you" in the title's reference to "your push notifications" is not the user, it is the marketer. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this piece.

Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being intermediated by big tech.

Something might come of introspecting why such controls are being built and desired by consumers instead of trying to frame everything as a "big tech evil!!1" narrative.

I’d recommend following your own train of thought, why is big tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their users and everyone else? They’ve done it for email, web search, mobile experiences, advertising, etc.

You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.

The chain of thought is quite straightforward. Functionally nobody wants an intermediary-free channel because there are adversarial entities on the other end.

Do you think that logic holds true for web search as well? Because this is happening there in a much stronger way too.

I'm not a fan of Apple or Google, and it feels bad that all of our notifications pass through APNS or FCM. Megacorps shouldn't have control over our digital lives to the extent that they do, and anyone talking about this gets my full attention and support.

Except for marketers! I don't think there's a less sympathetic category of technologists, save for maybe CSAM peddlers.

You're upset that you can't get "visibility" into whether the bullshit ad you tried to ram down my throat landed on target? You're worried that I'm a dormant user and my phone will silently delete the spam you sent to try to hook me back into engaging with whatever worthless product you're hawking?

World's tiniest violin, buddy. Boo fucking hoo. Your last paragraph says the "senders" (read: spammers) who make it through the next decade intact will be, to lightly paraphrase, the ones who send messages the recipients actually wanted. You say that like it's a bad thing!

The computer is in my life because it is a tool that does the things I want. It is not an open mic for marketing sleazebags to try to sell me shit. May every single one of your attempts to invade my life and hijack my attention be flushed swiftly down the toilet.

If we had visibility, we would know what doesn't work and we would stop sending it. Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.

Personally, all I've seen is marketers not getting the message and using it to perform A/B testing to come up with the basest ad they could possibly come up with to entrap more users.

One could take an equally uncharitable approach to what engineers and product teams do.

Yes and that would be completely correct in many cases.

> Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.

You might very well be the exception, but for something like 99% of marketing content that reaches me, our interests aren't aligned. First of all, they want to generate "needs" where there weren't any before and probably shouldn't be. A pizza ad produces the wish for unhealthy food. A fashion ad produces the wish for new clothes (even though I have enough) and probably even changes the societal dynamics of individual expression and personal style to be consumption oriented.

Second, even if I have a legitimate need for a solution, they still want me to buy their product, consume their media, give my attention to them. I, on the other hand, want to be informed by a neutral third party about the pros and cons of some product. Sure you can say "but unhappy customers are bad for us", but there are actually very few niches, where this signal is powerful enough to align incentives, because information and power asymmetry limit the customers understanding of product quality and their leverage to correct harmful market dynamics.

>discovery

I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions

(Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)

Depends. Blackberry 10 hub was strongly designed as a shared inbox instead of a loose system of notification like ios or android.

And it was awesome.

Yeah these channels used to be respected in that way.

And then app developers discovered that hooks like "look what you missed" work on users and so now we all have to get them in the same category.

I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.

That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must:

> Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose.

A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.

Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them.

Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer.

So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.

> (read: spam)

is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.

It should but apps don't let us decide.

An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it.

Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.

You know, I would love a feature that lets me mark push notifications as spam, and optionally send them to Apple. The last part is important for a variety of reasons, one of which is that notifications can be end to end encrypted.

Spam filter push notifications.

Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.

You’re right of course, but Apple won’t do it - they’re happily running a two-tier system where Uber, eBay, Doordash can force spam notifications on you with impunity. All my settings for marketing are off - eBay still sends me notifications about coupons (and additionally there’s no way to actually contact them to complain, of course). Doordash won’t let me get delivery notifications without marketing notifications.

Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a heartbeat, but they won’t.

like I said, you decide by muting or removing the offending app.

Fine, but that’s was clearly not enough to stop the spam, nor it was enough to satisfy everyone.

There are some apps I can’t afford to mute or uninstall, such as phone, transportation, communication and work. I wish I could, but I currently can’t, I’m not privileged enough.

“Punishment by Apple” in this instance is somehow the only response anyone had to misbehaving companies.

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