Live data from Hacker News

I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

alexanderell.is

241–250 of 366 posts

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#241
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been struggling with the Uber app and Uber Eats who has been sending me ads which I found no way to disable. My problem is that I do want notifications for when my driver has arrived.

I wonder if you could write a Shortcut that, after an Uber ride is booked, notifications are enabled and once the ride ends, they are disabled again?

I just tried, unless I’m missing an update, Uber Eats doesn’t even show up under the Apps that I can select from to build a shortcut for.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s entirely developer decided. Most are starting to recombine channels to get around the feature.

The parent clearly knows that, hence their second point: "And if someone goes out of their way to "accidentally" mess with that system (oops, this promotion went into the navigation category, silly me), they deserve to go all out silenced."

Accidentally or intentionally misclassifying notifications is not the same thing as getting rid of the categories entirely.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#244
Technically Apple says if you want to send promotional notifications you have to ask for that permission explicitly and offer the user a way to turn just those notification types on/off. Maybe complain FWIW https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#245

Technically Apple says if you want to send promotional notifications you have to ask for that permission explicitly and offer the user a way to turn just those notification types on/off. Maybe complain FWIW https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

I'm a little surprised iOS doesn't have a way to report a notification as spam.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#246
Every notification system eventually becomes email. What that means is that we probably need OS-level spam filters so that you can report things as spam. If the notification looks spammy based on the training, it simply won't show up. Marketers think they're reaching you, an army of software engineers remained employed to figure out how to refactor the API to send notifications with the V3 protocol or whatever unnecessary change the OS vendor made this week (driving up every other software engineer's salary; thank you!), but you don't have to be woken up by the latest not-actually-a-very-good-deal.

Whether or not the notification was delivered or blocked by the filter probably shouldn't be fed back to the application, to stave off the inevitable workarounds. But people will test stuff on their own devices and find workarounds. "Your order has arrived! Tap for details." But when you tap it's just an ad. On the other hand, it would be nice for things like Pagerduty to know that all of their notifications were blocked and that they should escalate to the next person on the rotation.

The "mark as spam" data should be fed back to the app stores, and if the app requested status notification privilege and not marketing notification privileges, their app is pulled until they fix it. (Cannot wait to read the whining about that. "I'm just trying to hustle like some blog post from 30 years ago said I should! ")

In the meantime, I don't really ever turn on app notifications. They usually email me, and what's great about email is I have the Spam folder and the Promotions tab, so I never see most of their communications.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#247
This post really lost me at: "and I’m sure they’re getting that many more engagements because of it" clearly what spam notifications do is make me question having installed the app in the first place. For me this has led to many uninstalls.

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#248
post #220

I have a somewhat similar gripe about apps, which has some recent implications: there seems to be some school of thought for engagement, which suggests that something that's not used at least weekly is useless. For this reason Google started automatically removing permissions from apps I didn't use for some time and it's also suggested I could delete them "to save space" which is frankly quite stupid -- I have quite…

I think that's indeed the default behavior, but when I go to a certain app permissions, I have an option "remove permissions and free up space", if I untick this I expect the permissions to stay in place, is that not the case?

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#249
post #23

My rule is: if I get a single notification that I find useless, I'll immediately disable that notification channel (I'm on Android; I'm not sure if iOS has a concept of channel-specific settings) for that app. Even if the channel can include useful notifications, as the article discusses. If the app doesn't bother to categorize its notifications into channels at all, I turn off its notifications entirely, and I won't…

This is also my policy - except: Uber just sent me a notification to celebrate pride month with Uber (by booking a car??). I don’t see how to turn off these promotional notifications but I need my Uber notifications so I’m aware when my driver is outside. I’m still not sure if I should block all Uber notifications.

It’s under the “privacy” in account settings. I just disabled marketing notifications

Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones

#250
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber Eat does different channel for notification though. Mine is set exactly as you described.

It's an option on android but not ios.

Go to account -> settings -> privacy -> notifications and you can turn off all the marketing notifications on iOS too for Uber / Uber Eats.
Post reply on HN