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

If I see a notification from an app, I clear it and then turn off notifications from the system settings for that. Android doesn't give an option to do it on device level for all apps.

if you can make do without notifications, I would recommend not integrating notifications.

In short my opinion on app notifications is that they need to be killed with fire. Then burned again just to be certain.

The only notifications I have enabled are the ones where timely information is important, e.g. gate changes for flights. Anything else gets shut off because it just NEVER is interesting and only succeeds in interrupting me. Call it the worst aspect of the attention economy.

If your app would ever interrupt me for anything that is not absolutely important, it would get uninstalled faster than I can swipe away the notification.

But well, I might not be your target audience (most probably am not actually)

Most people seem to be tolerant of notifications. I also suspect most people do not know how to prevent receiving notifications. In public (for example, on the train) I see people receiving many notifications, checking most of them, and manually dismissing the rest.

To build engagement you will want to notify people. However, there is a fine line between a tolerable amount of notifications and an annoying amount of notifications. I would suggest:

1. Make your users feel like the notifications are always a result of their own choice. For example, a notification for something they chose to follow is likely to be tolerated. A notification for something they did not choose to follow will be more likely to be seen as annoying notification spam.

2. Make it really easy for a user to stop notifications in a fine-grained way, or to receive them less frequently. Ideally, they could do this directly after clicking-through the notification (or on the notification itself, if possible). This gives users a way to keep your service from breaching their tolerance threshold, and may therefore prevent them from leaving your service altogether.

My target audience is mostly the average joe internet user. What I found is that the ones who contribute quality content sometimes return back to their post to check for comments and respond. But most of the time it's unattended comments. So I am still experimenting.

It's highly likely that they have been conditioned on all platforms and expecting the same here too. A weekly digest type of email is something I am considering. Not to grab their attention, but to nudge them about the existence of unattended comments.