Largely agree. An app basically gets one chance with me, and if it sends marketing or something through a notification, it is uninstalled or at least silenced completely (if I really need it).
> Maddest of all, it has been trying alert me to the current weather throughout the day
Ugh. One of my pet peeves. Everything has to tell me the weather. My android tablet has it (permanently?) in the notifications. Windows has it in the menu bar. Various apps have it somewhere in the corner or something. And you can't remove/change some of these.
I feel like weather apps/programs are something that programmers think is useful to people, and is relatively easy, well-trodden territory. But in reality, it's not really that useful to know the exact temperature constantly, and have it take up space on my screen.
I was following, in my mind going "ha ha, Windows", until the author moved on to ranting about the Mac notifications, and recounted experiences that don't match mine at all.
Or perhaps I just always deny by default notifications from apps, and if I do enable them I deny them sound and usually deny banners, so I rarely get bothered no matter the mode
I get exactly zero notifications on my Mac computers, except for update notifications. I do mostly use this computer for dev work, I guess the author is just installing random crap? Not sure
MacOS (and iOS) has a subtly different problem in the built-in apps:
Every single fucking Apple app has a shitty first-run experience that nags you about "WATS NEW IN MAPS" or whatnot, the first time you open it after an OS update. Product managers throughout Apple are so worried that their pet features won't get enough adoption, so the solution is to prevent me from using the app at all until I acknowledge the work they did over the past year. And the wording is always so fucking cutesy: You have to press "Start Listening" to dismiss the "What's new in Music" dialog. Why not a "Shut the fuck up" button instead...
Is it too much to ask for the following?
- Provide a "what's new in macOS" somewhere in the Settings app
- Don't have a notification badge for it. Let me browse to it myself when I'm curious.
- The "what's new in macOS" can have an overview of what's changed in _all_ of the apps.
- I can completely ignore what's new if I want. The part of Settings that says what's new should be a simple swipe to dismiss, and after that it should be buried in About (or some other spot) so that I can get to it later if I want, and I can revisit it multiple times if I want to learn more.
Nevermind the Cheddar News of the pump, that's its own separate nightmare, but I just want gas. I put my card in, you give me gas. Skip the receipt prompt, skip the carwash prompt, and no I don't have a rewards card.
It sounds like this author hasn’t even attempted anything other than focus mode. Notifications are highly configurable in Macos. Having Siri enabled while on a conference call is just asking for an interruption.
I agree that notifications can be a nuisance, generally speaking, but my mbp is the quietest of them all.
You need to look closer at what the author is saying.
It's not the app's notifications, it's the notification from the system itself.
If you update / install apps with brew, you get the system ask you again each time after the update whether you want the notification or not; the software may be malware download from internet. It is just silly.
> Mac notifications are even worse, despite macOS having a similar Do Not Disturb feature called Focus. Until you beat them down with a shitty stick, Mac apps inform you needlessly every two fucking seconds about absolutely everything and anything that happens on the computer. I'm only surprised that the macOS doesn't notify you every time an electron passes through the MagSafe plug.
My only issue with notifications is when app constantly reminds me that I don't have notifications on. I'm aware, I pressed no on purpose, your app doesn't need to remind me of anything so don't remind me to turn on notifications that I already denied.
Gets even worse on mobile. Android supposedly lets you turn some types of notifications off, so unscrupulous companies put all their notifications, ranging from necessary to pure advertisement, under one type.
Looking at you, UberEats. The tradeoff for knowing my food is arriving should not be a business being able to interrupt my goddamn peace of mind at any hour it wishes.
I cannot believe how user hostile the notifications for the food delivery apps are. Frequent spamming which you cannot turn off without turning off delivery notifications
Uber lost my business entirely, because it's hard to use effectively without notifications (you constantly have to be watching to see when your ride/food arrives), but they abuse notifications so badly that I would never leave them on.
My typical workflow when recording a video on iPad is: Turn on. Open Camera app. Press record. Wait 3 seconds. Dismiss "Sign in to iCloud" notification.
Just thinking today of a dark pattern that Twitter uses, amongst others.
"Would you like notifications to your desktop?"
"Yes"
"Not now"
For any web site designers who think this is acceptable, there will be a special purgatory for you. The opposite of Yes is "No". If you want a third option, "remind me later", great. Otherwise, piss off.
It's not the person, it's the system. The market for attention makes the choice, iteratively. If this product manager doesn't do it, his numbers go to shit and he's fired to be replaced with that product manager, with a "better" track record. Who will employ all the dark patterns he can get away with, and keep his track record "stellar".
Maybe so, but the PM is still taking hostile action against the users. If the company requires such behavior and employees go along with it, it's still totally fair to blame the employees as well as the company.
This has been the case since the dawn of notifications and most choices by apps in general. They don't want you to say no. At least on iphone notifications aren't baked into features like play and pause buttons. Iirc on Android you only get media controls outside of the app if you enable notifications and then you have to fine tune them if all you want are media controls. I can't help but feel like that in itself is a darker pattern.
This one makes me angry every time it comes up. I'm very selective of the notifications I allow on my devices in order to protect my attention, and some product manager has the audacity to assume I need to give loud strangers on the internet the ability to rob me of my finite attention whenever they have a hot take.
The pattern is usually worse than you think, because you click "not now".
Typically, the browser or phone OS does enforce a yes-or-no answer, and if you pick "no" the site or app is not allowed to ask again. So the "Would you like notifications" screen doesn't actually use the host program's API to enable notifications, it just brings up the dialog and asks you again.
This often means that there is a "no and stop asking" option. You just have to realize which dialogs are brought up by the application or the host environment, "accept" the application's request, and then deny the actual permissions request.
Yep, if the web page asks if I want notifications, I click "Yes" and then when my browser asks, I say "No." Permanently blocked and worked around the broken anti-user pattern.
check the box next to - "Don't allow sites to send notifications
Features that need notifications won't work"
---
edit: I'll add, a lot of times you'll still need to click "yes" to the site popup asking if you want notifications, so the shitty user tracking they're doing will mark you as enabled. But it skips the second step of having to click no to the actual browser prompt.
The question is what notifications won't show up? Maybe a 'you have email' or 'you have a meeting in 10 minutes'. Only the meeting notification is useful to me out of the thousands of times websites asked. Thanks for pointing out that setting.
Disabling notification is like zero inbox now, it takes discipline. I'm glad I started early because if I had to do so from scratch now, it would be terrible.
I have a zero tolerance policy for notifications. They just become spam, but more intrusive. I turn them off. If an application manages to slip one through anyway, I uninstall it.
I have almost no audible notifications and when i switched years ago it was a huge improvement to my stress levels!
That said, notifications need to be a lot more sophisticated before they aren't just pointless noise. Currently it's like they're at iteration two or three and they need to be refined loads more.
Smarter ways to carve them up are needed with sensible defaults. The big challenge though, as others highlight, is the conflict of interest developers have vs users.
My preference for many would be to only notify on a surprising change. Getting a computer to know what is/isn't surprising can be awkward in some cases, but with things like the weather, it's obvious: if tomorrow is +/- 5° different to today tell me, if it's dramatically different weather tell me (eg clear going to major rain) but otherwise why would i need to be prompted for weather when i can go look it up if i happen to have special reason to want to know the forecast.
I had a bad case of phantom vibration syndrome[0] about 10 years ago. The smallest vibration and I thought it was a call. I addressed this by turning my phone to silent. No ringtones or vibrations to alert me of a call, just a small screen interruption that tells me there's a call, and that's it. I also disabled every single notification for every app, including those annoying 'badges' that tell you how many unread emails sit in your Inbox.
I also schedule calls more than I did 10 years ago. For example, I may tell a colleague or friend: ring me at 8PM. Then I can be emotionally prepared for a call, without a call catching me off-guard. I'm a nervous person who finds most calls distressing, and sometimes I literally just stare at my phone's screen during an incoming call and just hope they hang up.
I’ve definitely been at a point where notifications got overwhelming to the point I had to turn off the phone to get a mental break.
But eventually I found a system that makes me like them.
Contrarian take: I now prefer an app offering the option to send lots of notifications, ideally with an ability to control at the app level, or as a fallback the OS level.
I get home security camera notifications when something is in view - sometimes hundreds per day. BUT I use iOS settings to make those notifs only show up in my end of day summary, nicely rolled up in 1 notification. If I want, I can change the trigger area of the camera view and get fewer notifs (or disable for some cams).
Apps can create inventory for notifications and I use OS controls for what and how much I see.
Unlike emails and sms, notifs are nice in that they auto disappear if not acted upon making them more of a stream I can engage with (or not depending on priorities) rather than an accumulating task list.
With hardware, I have realized that there should be a "critical updates only" mode with all hardware (similar to the silent toggle in an iPhone) - it's a clear intent from the user that they don't want to be bothered.
With software, it is nearly inexcusable to do things incorrectly because most major platforms offer at least one right way to do things (not that the platforms follow the gospel themselves - as the OP pointed out). What we now need to more than guidelines - we need guardrails. At a minimum, I want to report apps which misuse the notification importance hierarchy, and those reports should impact the app-review cycles on app stores.
On the topic of how much something wants to "alert" you about, there is a clear culprit here - of course, the notorious-on-HN software churn where people want to constantly be able to write "added feature X" on their appraisal sheet. It needs to stop.
I don't understand why notifications suck so hard.
Also: my phone doesn't need to vibrate & make sound every time someone sends a message in the same chat group. Vibrate once, then shut the hell up for at least 15 minutes.
I think I'll take this opportunity to introduce "HackerNotify" (https://lotw.site/net/HackerNotify.app), which is a different kind of interface into the Hacker News backend (via firebase).
You can tell how many total comments a story has by the color of its title. The ranking from low to high is: dark blue -> light blue -> aqua -> green -> yellow -> orange -> red.
It has a keyboard-centric interface. Here is the breakdown:
'Space' toggles an item's open/closed state.
'Tab' is used to move between items in a list. If an item is in the open state, pressing tab will focus the first item in its list. Otherwise, it will focus the next item in the list that the item is a member of. This is really the "go to" key in the app. If ever in doubt, just hit 'tab'.
'Enter' is for opening the link (in a new window) to which a "story" item refers. (You can also click the link to open it.) When a notice (see below) is in focus, hitting 'enter' should bring you directly to the item that it refers to, in an opened and synced state. Doing this might still fail, though, which is why there is a "hard reset" option in the app.
'c' is for popping open a comment window to respond to whichever item is in focus.
'n' is for setting a "notice" to periodically poll the backend for new replies to a given item (story or comment). The current polling period is one minute.
'/' is for cycling between the 3 screens of the app (Top stories, Watched stories and Notifications).
'1' is to jump to the "Top stories" screen. (All story titles that start out as "Launch HN:" are filtered out of the listing.)
'2' is to jump to the "Watched stories" screen. "Watched stories" is the screen that will hold the top level story items that contain notification items that are no longer embedded in the DOM of the "Top stories" screen.
'3' is to jump to the "Notifications" screen.
'x' is to delete a given notice. The app currently allows for 5 notices to be set at any given time.
'r' is used to refresh a given item to sync it with the firebase backend.
'Esc' allows you to "escape out" of embedded items. This key also automatically closes items.
'Ctrl+Esc' allows you to immediately escape out to the top level listing, closing all embedded comments along the way.
Finally, since there may still be a bug or two in the app's logic, 'Alt+l' is the "hard reset" shortcut that forcefully closes and blurs every item on every screen. If you need to invoke this shortcut, just pressing 'Tab' again should get you back on your feet.
The link I provided above allows you to open up a Linux on the Web app in the experimental "app mode". If you want to play around with it in its native environment, though, you will need to need to see the LOTW README: https://github.com/linuxontheweb/LOTW#applications
I could rant for a long time about notifications. I spend a lot of time curating them. I have them outright disabled on most apps on my phone. I don't allow any desktop notifications on my PC. I've dealt with facebook notifications for a long time. One of the most annoying things about facebook notifications is that I will get notified when other people reply to a thread that I've replied to, even when they aren't replying to me directly. But if I turn notifications off, I don't get any for direct replies to me.
There are very few things I want to be notified of. Mainly I want to be notified when a person has directly interacted with me or with something I've said. I setup an instagram account forever ago and tried to set it up so I only got those types of notifications, but it would give me a notification to essentially just open the app. I couldn't turn that off, so I just disabled notifications entirely. Now I don't even open the app anymore.
I'm part of a team that uses basecamp to communicate, and I constantly have to unsubscribe from new threads where all of the replies are "ok" or thumbs up emoji or whatever. It's annoying, but nowhere near as bad as the "band" app we used before that. That app had the worst notification experience I've ever had. It would give you notifications for all kinds of things that were completely irrelevant to anything. It's the only app I've bothered to review.
I now have the opposite problem on Android - not getting notifications when I need them. I rely on Todoist for a lot of reminders where it really is important that it notifies me at the right time. But despite everything I've tried (disabling battery optimization etc.), the phone will not deliver them on time. It doesn't listen for notifications when locked, so I only get them if i unlock my phone for some other reason and check, which could be hours late :/
The notifications are getting so bad that it's probably time to (gasp) pass laws severely regulating them.
I would do something like:
- All notifications must be explicitly opt-in
- Notifications can't be merged into a single generic notification
- Promotional notifications must be able to be disabled without blocking the primary function of the application
- (And here's how to really bring them under control.) Prior to installing an application, the user must explicitly choose which notifications are enabled. All notifications must be disabled by default in the menu
Audible lost me as a customer forever because of unnecessary promotional notifications. In general I disable notifications on my phone for everything other than what I actually would want to be interrupted by. For me that's things like texts, phone calls, a few messaging apps, and I get a notification whenever my credit card is used. Everything else gets blocked (side note but I really wish Android had a way to block all notifications by default except for whitelisted apps instead of allowing everything by default and making you block them on an app by app basis). I was a happy paying Audible customer for years until they sent an advertisement through notification. The Audible app is a bit unique in that audiobook controls for pause, play, etc are done through a notification so I couldn't just disable them entirely.
It really made me salty that I was getting advertisements for a service I was already paying $15 a month for. I even went through customer service and they told me there was no way to disable just those notifications. I would probably still be a subscriber today and that was maybe 6-7 years ago so they missed out on more than a thousand dollars from me because they couldn't resist sending stupid advertisements to paying customers and I doubt anyone at Amazon even cares.
Every time we get a notification, we check our phone. It's almost Pavlovian. But it's not the notification causing the reaction. It's the anticipation of what the notification might be that makes us reach for our phones.
We've trained ourselves to be alert, to look at our phones, to see what might be there, and I think it's time we had a talk about it.
48 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] thread> Maddest of all, it has been trying alert me to the current weather throughout the day
Ugh. One of my pet peeves. Everything has to tell me the weather. My android tablet has it (permanently?) in the notifications. Windows has it in the menu bar. Various apps have it somewhere in the corner or something. And you can't remove/change some of these.
I feel like weather apps/programs are something that programmers think is useful to people, and is relatively easy, well-trodden territory. But in reality, it's not really that useful to know the exact temperature constantly, and have it take up space on my screen.
But even so linux already doesn't disturb you unless you configure it to, like an OS should
So if some distro or desktop has a "do not disturb" setting that sounds worrying, since it indicates that by default it does disturb you
Or perhaps I just always deny by default notifications from apps, and if I do enable them I deny them sound and usually deny banners, so I rarely get bothered no matter the mode
Every single fucking Apple app has a shitty first-run experience that nags you about "WATS NEW IN MAPS" or whatnot, the first time you open it after an OS update. Product managers throughout Apple are so worried that their pet features won't get enough adoption, so the solution is to prevent me from using the app at all until I acknowledge the work they did over the past year. And the wording is always so fucking cutesy: You have to press "Start Listening" to dismiss the "What's new in Music" dialog. Why not a "Shut the fuck up" button instead...
Is it too much to ask for the following?
- Provide a "what's new in macOS" somewhere in the Settings app
- Don't have a notification badge for it. Let me browse to it myself when I'm curious.
- The "what's new in macOS" can have an overview of what's changed in _all_ of the apps.
- I can completely ignore what's new if I want. The part of Settings that says what's new should be a simple swipe to dismiss, and after that it should be buried in About (or some other spot) so that I can get to it later if I want, and I can revisit it multiple times if I want to learn more.
Distantly related: Vending machines should have a big red button* "just give it to me, i don't care about no change, just fucking give it to me".
*2022 edition. A big red button that has to be pressed three times (for the easily-offended amongst us).
Nevermind the Cheddar News of the pump, that's its own separate nightmare, but I just want gas. I put my card in, you give me gas. Skip the receipt prompt, skip the carwash prompt, and no I don't have a rewards card.
I agree that notifications can be a nuisance, generally speaking, but my mbp is the quietest of them all.
Exactly.
Looking at you, UberEats. The tradeoff for knowing my food is arriving should not be a business being able to interrupt my goddamn peace of mind at any hour it wishes.
"Would you like notifications to your desktop?" "Yes" "Not now"
For any web site designers who think this is acceptable, there will be a special purgatory for you. The opposite of Yes is "No". If you want a third option, "remind me later", great. Otherwise, piss off.
Typically, the browser or phone OS does enforce a yes-or-no answer, and if you pick "no" the site or app is not allowed to ask again. So the "Would you like notifications" screen doesn't actually use the host program's API to enable notifications, it just brings up the dialog and asks you again.
This often means that there is a "no and stop asking" option. You just have to realize which dialogs are brought up by the application or the host environment, "accept" the application's request, and then deny the actual permissions request.
chrome://settings/content/notifications
check the box next to - "Don't allow sites to send notifications Features that need notifications won't work"
--- edit: I'll add, a lot of times you'll still need to click "yes" to the site popup asking if you want notifications, so the shitty user tracking they're doing will mark you as enabled. But it skips the second step of having to click no to the actual browser prompt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)
That said, notifications need to be a lot more sophisticated before they aren't just pointless noise. Currently it's like they're at iteration two or three and they need to be refined loads more.
Smarter ways to carve them up are needed with sensible defaults. The big challenge though, as others highlight, is the conflict of interest developers have vs users.
My preference for many would be to only notify on a surprising change. Getting a computer to know what is/isn't surprising can be awkward in some cases, but with things like the weather, it's obvious: if tomorrow is +/- 5° different to today tell me, if it's dramatically different weather tell me (eg clear going to major rain) but otherwise why would i need to be prompted for weather when i can go look it up if i happen to have special reason to want to know the forecast.
I also schedule calls more than I did 10 years ago. For example, I may tell a colleague or friend: ring me at 8PM. Then I can be emotionally prepared for a call, without a call catching me off-guard. I'm a nervous person who finds most calls distressing, and sometimes I literally just stare at my phone's screen during an incoming call and just hope they hang up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_vibration_syndrome
But eventually I found a system that makes me like them.
Contrarian take: I now prefer an app offering the option to send lots of notifications, ideally with an ability to control at the app level, or as a fallback the OS level.
I get home security camera notifications when something is in view - sometimes hundreds per day. BUT I use iOS settings to make those notifs only show up in my end of day summary, nicely rolled up in 1 notification. If I want, I can change the trigger area of the camera view and get fewer notifs (or disable for some cams).
Apps can create inventory for notifications and I use OS controls for what and how much I see.
Unlike emails and sms, notifs are nice in that they auto disappear if not acted upon making them more of a stream I can engage with (or not depending on priorities) rather than an accumulating task list.
With hardware, I have realized that there should be a "critical updates only" mode with all hardware (similar to the silent toggle in an iPhone) - it's a clear intent from the user that they don't want to be bothered.
With software, it is nearly inexcusable to do things incorrectly because most major platforms offer at least one right way to do things (not that the platforms follow the gospel themselves - as the OP pointed out). What we now need to more than guidelines - we need guardrails. At a minimum, I want to report apps which misuse the notification importance hierarchy, and those reports should impact the app-review cycles on app stores.
On the topic of how much something wants to "alert" you about, there is a clear culprit here - of course, the notorious-on-HN software churn where people want to constantly be able to write "added feature X" on their appraisal sheet. It needs to stop.
You can tell how many total comments a story has by the color of its title. The ranking from low to high is: dark blue -> light blue -> aqua -> green -> yellow -> orange -> red.
It has a keyboard-centric interface. Here is the breakdown:
'Space' toggles an item's open/closed state.
'Tab' is used to move between items in a list. If an item is in the open state, pressing tab will focus the first item in its list. Otherwise, it will focus the next item in the list that the item is a member of. This is really the "go to" key in the app. If ever in doubt, just hit 'tab'.
'Enter' is for opening the link (in a new window) to which a "story" item refers. (You can also click the link to open it.) When a notice (see below) is in focus, hitting 'enter' should bring you directly to the item that it refers to, in an opened and synced state. Doing this might still fail, though, which is why there is a "hard reset" option in the app.
'c' is for popping open a comment window to respond to whichever item is in focus.
'n' is for setting a "notice" to periodically poll the backend for new replies to a given item (story or comment). The current polling period is one minute.
'/' is for cycling between the 3 screens of the app (Top stories, Watched stories and Notifications).
'1' is to jump to the "Top stories" screen. (All story titles that start out as "Launch HN:" are filtered out of the listing.)
'2' is to jump to the "Watched stories" screen. "Watched stories" is the screen that will hold the top level story items that contain notification items that are no longer embedded in the DOM of the "Top stories" screen.
'3' is to jump to the "Notifications" screen.
'x' is to delete a given notice. The app currently allows for 5 notices to be set at any given time.
'r' is used to refresh a given item to sync it with the firebase backend.
'Esc' allows you to "escape out" of embedded items. This key also automatically closes items.
'Ctrl+Esc' allows you to immediately escape out to the top level listing, closing all embedded comments along the way.
Finally, since there may still be a bug or two in the app's logic, 'Alt+l' is the "hard reset" shortcut that forcefully closes and blurs every item on every screen. If you need to invoke this shortcut, just pressing 'Tab' again should get you back on your feet.
The link I provided above allows you to open up a Linux on the Web app in the experimental "app mode". If you want to play around with it in its native environment, though, you will need to need to see the LOTW README: https://github.com/linuxontheweb/LOTW#applications
There are very few things I want to be notified of. Mainly I want to be notified when a person has directly interacted with me or with something I've said. I setup an instagram account forever ago and tried to set it up so I only got those types of notifications, but it would give me a notification to essentially just open the app. I couldn't turn that off, so I just disabled notifications entirely. Now I don't even open the app anymore.
I'm part of a team that uses basecamp to communicate, and I constantly have to unsubscribe from new threads where all of the replies are "ok" or thumbs up emoji or whatever. It's annoying, but nowhere near as bad as the "band" app we used before that. That app had the worst notification experience I've ever had. It would give you notifications for all kinds of things that were completely irrelevant to anything. It's the only app I've bothered to review.
I would do something like:
- All notifications must be explicitly opt-in
- Notifications can't be merged into a single generic notification
- Promotional notifications must be able to be disabled without blocking the primary function of the application
- (And here's how to really bring them under control.) Prior to installing an application, the user must explicitly choose which notifications are enabled. All notifications must be disabled by default in the menu
It really made me salty that I was getting advertisements for a service I was already paying $15 a month for. I even went through customer service and they told me there was no way to disable just those notifications. I would probably still be a subscriber today and that was maybe 6-7 years ago so they missed out on more than a thousand dollars from me because they couldn't resist sending stupid advertisements to paying customers and I doubt anyone at Amazon even cares.
We've trained ourselves to be alert, to look at our phones, to see what might be there, and I think it's time we had a talk about it.