Hmm, every single push notification I get on my phone is useful (new podcast published, new chat message from people I care about, period ticket for public transport has expired). Every web push notification is similar (someone pinged me in IRC, someone sent me a message on Telegram). If 99.999% of the push notifications you receive are shit, you have failed as an administrator of your personal devices.
I administrate pretty aggressively as well, but I found it only manageable, at least on Android, if you start by blocking all notifications, and then opt in very selectively. Specifically, I have every app’s notifications blacklisted in the main Android settings, and then I have selectively enabled notifications from only two (Signal and Messages).
Before I discovered you could do that, I found curating notifications to be too much of a game of whack-a-mole that repeatedly wasted my time and energy. Even when I’d get into a state where I was happy with the notifications I was getting, it was always temporary, because many apps will add new types of notifications when the app auto-updates, and opt you in to them by default. Then you have to try to dig through each app’s settings menu (each one different and seemingly deliberately complicated) to figure out where this new notification is coming from. Examples from the past few months of apps that have done this: Twitter, Google Maps, Maps.me. After this happened repeatedly, I got tired of it and just blacklisted them all. If they weren’t so aggressively trying to spam me, I wouldn’t mind notifications from some (e.g. I found some of the Google Maps transit notifications useful), but not at the cost of every other app update adding a new kind of notification to advertise McDonald’s locations to me.
I have somehow never installed any notification-spammy Android apps. Well, almost — SoundHound occasionally shows some junk, but it’s so rare I haven’t even bothered to disable it.
The notification I see the most is “tap to update Firefox Nightly” :D
Those statements are not very useful by themselves. User have to limit number of sites that he uses or a browser, with optional extension, has to filter all the sites.
If I ever implement my idea of a search engine that doesn’t index ad serving and maybe also JavaScript serving sites then I will see if that kind of web is useful.
It’s super useful though, when one of my open tabs has something new and important like a new private message or if I have been pinged then I want to see it pop up a notification. What I don’t want to see is a popup saying you have added a new post to your blog or letting me know something on your store is on sale.
I have a theory. It’s not that users don’t want push notifications.
Sorry, your theory is wrong.
Ok. Hyperbole aside. Here is my optimal user experience: I go to a website and find out I like it. Maybe it’s 538 because I’m a politics junkie and I love their blog posts. I go “jeez, I love these posts so much. I’d really like a notification for whenever there’s a new one.” So I see the “subscribe to this blog” button, which is exactly what I wanted. Hot dog. I press it, and I get the request from the browser to allow notifications. “Uh, duh,” I say to myself, “I definitely want this. Hurry up!” I press the button, and bingo, I’m subscribed on my own terms.
Fast forward a week. I figure out real fast that only Nate Silver’s posts are interesting. I’m ignoring the notifications now for all other blog posts whenever I see them. So I click on his name because I’m interested in reading his past blog posts when I notice that there’s a subscribe button for Nate Silver’s posts specifically. “Oh,” I say to myself, “I’d like this instead.” I subscribe to Nate Silver’s posts, and then I unsubscribe from the whole site. The point is, I’m interacting with the content I want. The site itself is servile. I am the master.
Fast forward five months. Everyone went a little crazy with the push notifications. I did, too, and now I’m accidentally subscribed to 248 websites. I get push notifications ever 120 milliseconds, on average. This is insane. Suddenly, trumpets blare in the distance. Hark, Vivaldi browser (who?) has added a new browser feature: notification queue. It just stores all your notifications in a list so you can see them later. Awesome… sort of. I’m getting a million of these. Well have no fear. You know how Google Inbox rolled out that sweet semantic categorization of emails so that I don’t have to see advertising ever again? Vivaldi does that, now. So I don’t even have to worry about the accidental advertising, it’s just lost forever in my queue and I never check it. Nice! (Not nice for Newegg).
Ok, but how do we handle the volume? Easy: add a merge option to push notification. Here’s an example. I’m subscribed to the Dharma and Greg Art Forum (???). I get a lot of notifications because I’m revered for my hyper realistic Dharma and Greg fan art. From a user perspective I don’t want to see two-thousand notifications from DGAF. I just want to see the most recent notification with a lot of info in it. Like a synopsis. “40 messages, last message from DharmaStalker85”. So set the merge option to Merge-Most-Recent. I’m sure they could be a lot more clever with this if they needed to. You could also add priority options like Important or Breaking, which needs no elaboration and the utility is very self evident.
Look at the web we have, now. I don’t have to visit any of the sites I like to check if there’s something new. I start by checking out my notifications for sites I care about. I prioritize, filter, search based on my whims. Google Chrome revamps their Now product to manage push notifications. It recommends me to check out sites I haven’t looked at in a while (or surreptitiously prioritizes sites that pay it a small fee…). It manages my notifications in evolving and more interesting ways. I already get interesting app notifications on my phone (new Netflix movies, new podcasts, etc.), so it’s time for the browser to catch up, too.
I wouldn’t say they suck but they are abused. Most decent websites already do show a message about why they want the permission first and if they don’t it’s almost always a website I don’t want notifications from.
99.9999999% of pushnotification are pure shit exactly like advertisement. Why one should be better than the other ?
Hmm, every single push notification I get on my phone is useful (new podcast published, new chat message from people I care about, period ticket for public transport has expired). Every web push notification is similar (someone pinged me in IRC, someone sent me a message on Telegram). If 99.999% of the push notifications you receive are shit, you have failed as an administrator of your personal devices.
it’s quite the industry fail that this is even a role that exists.
I administrate pretty aggressively as well, but I found it only manageable, at least on Android, if you start by blocking all notifications, and then opt in very selectively. Specifically, I have every app’s notifications blacklisted in the main Android settings, and then I have selectively enabled notifications from only two (Signal and Messages).
Before I discovered you could do that, I found curating notifications to be too much of a game of whack-a-mole that repeatedly wasted my time and energy. Even when I’d get into a state where I was happy with the notifications I was getting, it was always temporary, because many apps will add new types of notifications when the app auto-updates, and opt you in to them by default. Then you have to try to dig through each app’s settings menu (each one different and seemingly deliberately complicated) to figure out where this new notification is coming from. Examples from the past few months of apps that have done this: Twitter, Google Maps, Maps.me. After this happened repeatedly, I got tired of it and just blacklisted them all. If they weren’t so aggressively trying to spam me, I wouldn’t mind notifications from some (e.g. I found some of the Google Maps transit notifications useful), but not at the cost of every other app update adding a new kind of notification to advertise McDonald’s locations to me.
I have somehow never installed any notification-spammy Android apps. Well, almost — SoundHound occasionally shows some junk, but it’s so rare I haven’t even bothered to disable it.
The notification I see the most is “tap to update Firefox Nightly” :D
Note that you added an important qualifier, that you receive. This is a subset of all notifications.
I mean 100% of the push notification they ask me for permission and that I refuse. I should never have refuse something that I did not wanted first
90% of everything is crap. 90% of HTML’s img tag usage is crap.
Those statements are not very useful by themselves. User have to limit number of sites that he uses or a browser, with optional extension, has to filter all the sites.
If I ever implement my idea of a search engine that doesn’t index ad serving and maybe also JavaScript serving sites then I will see if that kind of web is useful.
Starting to hear neil postman’s ghost wail “I told you so”.
[Comment from banned user removed]
It’s super useful though, when one of my open tabs has something new and important like a new private message or if I have been pinged then I want to see it pop up a notification. What I don’t want to see is a popup saying you have added a new post to your blog or letting me know something on your store is on sale.
Sorry, your theory is wrong.
Ok. Hyperbole aside. Here is my optimal user experience: I go to a website and find out I like it. Maybe it’s 538 because I’m a politics junkie and I love their blog posts. I go “jeez, I love these posts so much. I’d really like a notification for whenever there’s a new one.” So I see the “subscribe to this blog” button, which is exactly what I wanted. Hot dog. I press it, and I get the request from the browser to allow notifications. “Uh, duh,” I say to myself, “I definitely want this. Hurry up!” I press the button, and bingo, I’m subscribed on my own terms.
Fast forward a week. I figure out real fast that only Nate Silver’s posts are interesting. I’m ignoring the notifications now for all other blog posts whenever I see them. So I click on his name because I’m interested in reading his past blog posts when I notice that there’s a subscribe button for Nate Silver’s posts specifically. “Oh,” I say to myself, “I’d like this instead.” I subscribe to Nate Silver’s posts, and then I unsubscribe from the whole site. The point is, I’m interacting with the content I want. The site itself is servile. I am the master.
Fast forward five months. Everyone went a little crazy with the push notifications. I did, too, and now I’m accidentally subscribed to 248 websites. I get push notifications ever 120 milliseconds, on average. This is insane. Suddenly, trumpets blare in the distance. Hark, Vivaldi browser (who?) has added a new browser feature: notification queue. It just stores all your notifications in a list so you can see them later. Awesome… sort of. I’m getting a million of these. Well have no fear. You know how Google Inbox rolled out that sweet semantic categorization of emails so that I don’t have to see advertising ever again? Vivaldi does that, now. So I don’t even have to worry about the accidental advertising, it’s just lost forever in my queue and I never check it. Nice! (Not nice for Newegg).
Ok, but how do we handle the volume? Easy: add a merge option to push notification. Here’s an example. I’m subscribed to the Dharma and Greg Art Forum (???). I get a lot of notifications because I’m revered for my hyper realistic Dharma and Greg fan art. From a user perspective I don’t want to see two-thousand notifications from DGAF. I just want to see the most recent notification with a lot of info in it. Like a synopsis. “40 messages, last message from DharmaStalker85”. So set the merge option to Merge-Most-Recent. I’m sure they could be a lot more clever with this if they needed to. You could also add priority options like Important or Breaking, which needs no elaboration and the utility is very self evident.
Look at the web we have, now. I don’t have to visit any of the sites I like to check if there’s something new. I start by checking out my notifications for sites I care about. I prioritize, filter, search based on my whims. Google Chrome revamps their Now product to manage push notifications. It recommends me to check out sites I haven’t looked at in a while (or surreptitiously prioritizes sites that pay it a small fee…). It manages my notifications in evolving and more interesting ways. I already get interesting app notifications on my phone (new Netflix movies, new podcasts, etc.), so it’s time for the browser to catch up, too.
I read this comment expecting the punchline at the end to be “and it was really just an RSS feed all along”.
I wrote something like that and deleted it…
Firefox 59 (current Nightly) has a global off switch per-permission that allows whitelisting specific websites. But what I found most amazing about this, is that it was contributed by volunteer.
The internet is made of people, after all :)
That global way off switching off all push notifications, is very welcome.
I wouldn’t say they suck but they are abused. Most decent websites already do show a message about why they want the permission first and if they don’t it’s almost always a website I don’t want notifications from.
The author should file an issue at https://github.com/WICG/interventions.