Technology has created a barrage of notifications and interactions

The author makes a bunch of dumb, easily fixable decisions and then writes a blog post whining about them. It’s so tiresome.

Totally up to the developer how they want to use the feature, but the idea is that there's bunch of different channels & that users can pick & choose from among them gives the user some control, some ability to decide for themselves what is important.

I introduced an issue for Web Notifications to add similar: https://github.com/whatwg/notifications/issues/154

In general though things are a mess. I'm talking about adding more complexity. Websites used to prompt for adding notifications, which was a pain, but now they put some HTML on screen instead to prompt for notifications, since to be friendly/secure it was decided user-interaction would be required to bring up the prompt for notifications. So websites still have harassing notifications prompts, just on the page instead of in the browser. And cookie and gdpr notifications. And a chat agent-bot pops up to ask if you have any questions. Ugh it's silly. So many affordances that all compete with one another. No standard place where they can reside, & be viewed or ignored as the user would prefer. The whole permissions model on the web has this problem: that permissions are interactive demands, versus something more passive (like living in the awesome-bar).

Only solution is to aggressively deny all push notification requests

For me, by default I deny notifications to apps. Only communications (like WhatsApp/Signal/iMessages/email client) and stuff that NEEDS to notify me (like UptimeRobot). For email, I only get notifications when emails hit a certain filter. For WhatsApp, I mute all the groups.

I legitimately want notifications of calendar events, missed calls, and messages on whatever screen I'm looking at now -- my desktop, my laptop, my watch, and my phone vibrating in my pocket for when I'm not looking at anything.

But once I get the message -- once I swipe left on my phone, hit "close" on my computer, or whatever, I want them all to disappear. Instead, I've got to swipe/close on every damn device. Regularly when I look at a new device, the first thing I need to do is remove notifications I've already seen. Sometimes I have to click into an app and navigate to notifications just to get the red dot to also disappear. Sometimes I have to delete an e-mail notification as well.

My desperate wish: there should be a standard across iOS, Android, SMS, dektop OS's, and e-mail to include a notification UUID with every notification, a standardized message format (user -> server) that means "dismiss everwhere", and yet another standardized message format (server -> device) that means "dimiss previous notification".

Android and iOS can build it into thier OS, and Gmail, Exchange and other e-mail providers can similarly build support for it (automatically mark the e-mail as read and archive it). Worst-case scenario, if your e-mail provider doesn't support it, you sometimes get an extra e-mail you filter out. (Or servers only bother sending the "remove existing notification" to e-mail domains that contain a flag advertising they support it.)

Any reason this wouldn't work? Or that it wouldn't make all our lives hugely better?