Ask HN: What's your opinion on notifications in general?

Push. That's my plight actually. There are already too many apps trying to find a place in the push notification channels. And given my stance on notifications, I am refraining myself from doing that for now. Planning on surveying my friends and family on this. They might be the right sample space.

This is a really helpful insight. Thank you.

How about when people return to your service, you just show them a little icon somewhere that tells them they have new replies to comments they made. And then when clicking on that, you get to see the relevant comments or threads ? It notifies them without being intrusive in any way.

I mean, I personally attempt to prevent any kind of "push" or "reminder" of happening, because that is to my benefit, but it might not benefit the engagement on your server. In essence, push is bad, pull is good as I see it.

Then again, I'm most certainly not the average technology user, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

I worked for a telecom marketing software service for seven years. My old boss was obsessed with notifications and mobile apps because he was a marketing “guru” and indirectly showed me how broken by design most services are in this respect. One day at work a serious bug was discovered and I suggested we do the responsible thing and notify users affected and my boss said it wasn’t a priority. Where, we as developers, draw the line in the sand seems to be whatever we feel is convenient for us at the moment.

Personally I feel that most users are already drowning in notifications, emails, badges, slack messages, ads, calls, etc that even if you did do an opt-in for notifications that most users would just ignore them since their attention is already too divided.

One thing to consider is not what your software should do but how it will really be used. The software I wrote was designed for sales teams to do marketing and communication but one day I discovered a bug that crippled the service, disabling most calls, while trying to fix an unrelated bug. This bug had been active for months, yet no users had reported it because they weren’t really using the software, in their minds they would rather not work at all and file false reports in the software to make it appear they had done their sales calls to meet their quotas. The bug was fixed but no measures were ever taken to fix the real bug which was the loop hole users were using to commit wage theft. The lesson here is that most users don’t want to use your software, their boss is making them and they hate their jobs. So why not focus on the real problem which is figuring out why your users hate their work and then fix that problem.

Every service is crazy about being “realtime” these days but imagine if git was realtime...cringy...yet more people do “real” collaboration with it than any other technology given the proposition that communication software such as slack isn’t really about collaboration at all. I’ve come to feel that if a software service feels they need notifications in order for it to work then they haven’t truly automated the problem they are solving. It’s like try/catch statements: 80% of the time the catch statements in practice are just //todo comments or log to an error table no one will ever read. So my last piece of advice is to think about notifications like catch clauses, meaning that if you do your job right then notifications shouldn’t be necessary at all.

I usually disable everything, but I also need to go against the grain in this thread and point out a side effect to that, at least to me personally: constantly manually checking for updates.

In my case it's email or whatsapp groups. For WhatsApp, the upside of disabling notifications greatly outweighs the time I lose checking manually. But for email, sometimes I turn notifications on just so I get rid of that bad habit. (Then turn them off again when it becomes annoying).