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

alexanderell.is

331–340 of 366 posts

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

#331

I was saying this yesterday, LinkedIn, as an example, sends me the most inane notifications as do many apps trying to steal my time. I pay LinkedIn 100 dollars a month, those notifications should serve me, not the other way around. I really don't care about some low substance content written by someone who I'm neither connected with nor follow.

Do you really need notifications at all from linked in? Couldn't you just open the app a couple of times a day to check for messages.

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

#332

If an app gives me spammy promotional notifications, it either A) gets uninstalled (if I don't particularly care about the app), B) gets a 1-star review with a clear comment about the notifications, or C) all of the above. The app I use to pay for parking spots suddenly gave me a notification once, apparently to try and get me to park my car more often or something. I gave it a one-star review, never saw one of those…

Can't you just disable notifications for the app? If you're on android you might just be able to disable the promotional notifications.

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

#333

Apple has lost the moral high ground because they decided to spam everyone with notifications for revenue-generating services like Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple TV+ etc in order to increase their services revenue. This also means they can't effectively enforce App Store guideline 4.5.4, which says: ... Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly o…

I agree.

One of the reasons why Apple says they need a walled garden approach is to ensure that we don't get spammed with promotional push notifications.

So if they aren't protecting users, and are themselves sending us promotions, then they have one less argument for a walled garden app store approach.

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

#334
This is a fairly straight forward expectation. That app developers have to be explicitly made aware of this through a public blog post is kind of shameful. It clearly shows to what extent they are ready to abuse user attention and how little they care about end user.

This is just another example in a looong list of things which point to a steady erosion of end user control on things and how they are being reduced to agents optimizing metrics that matter for my app/product.

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same on the Nespresso site with the “Hey, I’m clippy, do you need help with your order?” covering the “Order” button. I systematically click on it and ask them to order by order. Then they explain how to close the chat, and I click on the next page, the chat opens, I ask them again to go away because I can’t focus while the icon is bouncing in my page. They don’t answer me anymore. As in: A corporate employe…

None of those chat agents connect to a real human until the AI has figured out that you have a need to talk to a human. You're not accomplishing much, if anything.

Maybe so for the above example, but I too make a point of replying to “Can I help you with anything?” popups with an active “No” and am often connected with what passes for a real human.

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

#336
post #9

As someone who travels a bit I’ve got quite some food delivery and ride share apps on my phone. The marketing notifications are driving me crazy, I regularly miss relevant notifications because Grab, Uber, Uber Eats, Glovo, Bolt, and Cabify are all sending me almost daily notifications with some sort of cringe content trying to nudge me to take a cab/order food. Especially Uber Eats and Glovo are bad.

Disable notifications for them. It's not a perfect solution but it will make your life calmer. Just re enable them when you need to use Über or on Android just disable the promotional notifications

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

#337
post #122
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…

> 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. Well, the developers have started fighting against that by not splitting notifications into channels anymore. Now you just get "…

You also get some apps with 20+ channels, adding lots of needless mental burden just to understand exactly what you are disabling.

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

#338
post #132

My general mindset is that I survived just fine before apps and notifications were a thing. If they provide truly useful information, I'll use them. If they become spammy or start trying to prod me to drive more engagement I'll disable, or delete, whatever is enabling that. If that means I delete the app, and possibly stop using the service altogether, so be it, I'm doing just fine.

Many people here express that kind of sentiment and I find it either irrationally rebellious or just false. We all survived just fine before smartphones, internet, electricity and so on. Does it mean we can just delete and cancel big stuff over small annoyances? We'll end up deleting most of our lives. I don't find marketing notifications somehow more egregious than the million other anti-consumer behaviors companies…

What notifications does Starbucks send that are so important? I've never used the app, but presumably you'd be in one of their coffee shops in order to get the coffee.

If it notifies you when you need to collect it from the counter, why not just collect it when they call your name? I can't think of any other reason Starbucks would need to notify me.

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

#339
post #204

This is literally what drove me away from Facebook, completely. Their constant “redesigning” of notification and privacy settings was a veiled effort to force whatever notifications in front of me. There are certain notifications I want from you Facebook, but you made a grave miscalculation when you thought I’d put up with everything else you threw at me. So here I am, a Facebook user since 2007(?) who pretty much wa…

What notifications do you want from Facebook? Messenger notifications makes sense but anything else can wait until you look at Facebook.

Messenger is a separate app, so it can be managed separately

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

#340

It once again comes down to the fact that we are the product, not the customer. In this article, Devin Booker is the customer. Also, after reading many comments with suggestions and hacks to work around this (which I also do, btw), I think we may be missing the point, our time is valuable, and if we've all just spent half a day figuring out how to get the proper applications from a single app on our phone, we've alre…

It doesn't take half a day to disable notifications!
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