46 ms·

I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam) > Cross-sell, upsell,

I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam) > Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.

Forgeties79 4mo ago
>discovery I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions (Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)
iamacyborg 4mo ago
Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being intermediated by big tech.
- supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
  Something might come of introspecting why such controls are being built and desired by consumers instead of trying to frame everything as a "big tech evil!!1" narrative.
  - iamacyborg 4mo ago
    I’d recommend following your own train of thought, why is big tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their users and everyone else? They’ve done it for email, web search, mobile experiences, advertising, etc. You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.
    - dodobirdlord 4mo ago
      The chain of thought is quite straightforward. Functionally nobody wants an intermediary-free channel because there are adversarial entities on the other end.
      - iamacyborg 4mo ago
        Do you think that logic holds true for web search as well? Because this is happening there in a much stronger way too.
    - nyx 4mo ago
      I'm not a fan of Apple or Google, and it feels bad that all of our notifications pass through APNS or FCM. Megacorps shouldn't have control over our digital lives to the extent that they do, and anyone talking about this gets my full attention and support. Except for marketers! I don't think there's a less sympathetic category of technologists, save for maybe CSAM peddlers. You're upset that you can't get "visibility" into whether the bullshit ad you tried to ram down my throat landed on target? You're worried that I'm a dormant user and my phone will silently delete the spam you sent to try to hook me back into engaging with whatever worthless product you're hawking? World's tiniest violin, buddy. Boo fucking hoo. Your last paragraph says the "senders" (read: spammers) who make it through the next decade intact will be, to lightly paraphrase, the ones who send messages the recipients actually wanted. You say that like it's a bad thing! The computer is in my life because it is a tool that does the things I want. It is not an open mic for marketing sleazebags to try to sell me shit. May every single one of your attempts to invade my life and hijack my attention be flushed swiftly down the toilet.
      - iamacyborg 4mo ago
        If we had visibility, we would know what doesn't work and we would stop sending it. Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.
        supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
        Personally, all I've seen is marketers not getting the message and using it to perform A/B testing to come up with the basest ad they could possibly come up with to entrap more users.
        iamacyborg 4mo ago
        One could take an equally uncharitable approach to what engineers and product teams do.
        Perseids 4mo ago
tcdent 4mo ago
Yeah these channels used to be respected in that way. And then app developers discovered that hooks like "look what you missed" work on users and so now we all have to get them in the same category.
baxtr 4mo ago
Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc. Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.
- iamacyborg 4mo ago
  And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.
  - lanerobertlane 4mo ago
    [dead]
- whstl 4mo ago
  Same for things like Uber. I do want to know when a car is arriving. I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.
  - warkdarrior 4mo ago
    Hi whstl, Are you hungry? Open your Uber Eats app now for 10% off. /this message sent through PalantirFinder -- from marketing and coupons to ordnance, we deliver everything!
- TheNewsIsHere 4mo ago
  I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…) But I digress.
- no-name-here 4mo ago
thisislife2 4mo ago
That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must: > Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose. A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.
- refulgentis 4mo ago
  Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them. Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer. So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
> (read: spam) is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.
- whstl 4mo ago
  It should but apps don't let us decide. An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it. Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.
  - TheNewsIsHere 4mo ago
    You know, I would love a feature that lets me mark push notifications as spam, and optionally send them to Apple. The last part is important for a variety of reasons, one of which is that notifications can be end to end encrypted. Spam filter push notifications. Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.
    - nickf 4mo ago
      You’re right of course, but Apple won’t do it - they’re happily running a two-tier system where Uber, eBay, Doordash can force spam notifications on you with impunity. All my settings for marketing are off - eBay still sends me notifications about coupons (and additionally there’s no way to actually contact them to complain, of course). Doordash won’t let me get delivery notifications without marketing notifications. Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a heartbeat, but they won’t.
  - b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
    like I said, you decide by muting or removing the offending app.
    - whstl 4mo ago
hithre 4mo ago
Depends. Blackberry 10 hub was strongly designed as a shared inbox instead of a loose system of notification like ios or android. And it was awesome.
ghostly_s 4mo ago
The "you" in the title's reference to "your push notifications" is not the user, it is the marketer. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this piece.
lukeschlather 4mo ago
I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.
EZ-E 4mo ago
I wish Apple would force app developers to implement different "channels" for promotional notifications vs transactional - so that you can pick and choose which ones you want.
- mycall 4mo ago
  In-app notifications settings should do this if they are trustworthy.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

Forgeties79 4mo ago

>discovery I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions (Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)

iamacyborg 4mo ago

Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being intermediated by big tech.

supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
Something might come of introspecting why such controls are being built and desired by consumers instead of trying to frame everything as a "big tech evil!!1" narrative.
- iamacyborg 4mo ago
  I’d recommend following your own train of thought, why is big tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their users and everyone else? They’ve done it for email, web search, mobile experiences, advertising, etc. You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.
  - dodobirdlord 4mo ago
    The chain of thought is quite straightforward. Functionally nobody wants an intermediary-free channel because there are adversarial entities on the other end.
    - iamacyborg 4mo ago
      Do you think that logic holds true for web search as well? Because this is happening there in a much stronger way too.
  - nyx 4mo ago
    I'm not a fan of Apple or Google, and it feels bad that all of our notifications pass through APNS or FCM. Megacorps shouldn't have control over our digital lives to the extent that they do, and anyone talking about this gets my full attention and support. Except for marketers! I don't think there's a less sympathetic category of technologists, save for maybe CSAM peddlers. You're upset that you can't get "visibility" into whether the bullshit ad you tried to ram down my throat landed on target? You're worried that I'm a dormant user and my phone will silently delete the spam you sent to try to hook me back into engaging with whatever worthless product you're hawking? World's tiniest violin, buddy. Boo fucking hoo. Your last paragraph says the "senders" (read: spammers) who make it through the next decade intact will be, to lightly paraphrase, the ones who send messages the recipients actually wanted. You say that like it's a bad thing! The computer is in my life because it is a tool that does the things I want. It is not an open mic for marketing sleazebags to try to sell me shit. May every single one of your attempts to invade my life and hijack my attention be flushed swiftly down the toilet.
    - iamacyborg 4mo ago
      If we had visibility, we would know what doesn't work and we would stop sending it. Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.
      - supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
        Personally, all I've seen is marketers not getting the message and using it to perform A/B testing to come up with the basest ad they could possibly come up with to entrap more users.
        iamacyborg 4mo ago
        One could take an equally uncharitable approach to what engineers and product teams do.
        Perseids 4mo ago

tcdent 4mo ago

Yeah these channels used to be respected in that way. And then app developers discovered that hooks like "look what you missed" work on users and so now we all have to get them in the same category.

baxtr 4mo ago

Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc. Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.

iamacyborg 4mo ago
And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.
- lanerobertlane 4mo ago
  [dead]
whstl 4mo ago
Same for things like Uber. I do want to know when a car is arriving. I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.
- warkdarrior 4mo ago
  Hi whstl, Are you hungry? Open your Uber Eats app now for 10% off. /this message sent through PalantirFinder -- from marketing and coupons to ordnance, we deliver everything!
TheNewsIsHere 4mo ago
I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…) But I digress.
no-name-here 4mo ago

thisislife2 4mo ago

That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must: > Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose. A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.

refulgentis 4mo ago
Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them. Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer. So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago

> (read: spam) is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.

whstl 4mo ago
It should but apps don't let us decide. An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it. Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.
- TheNewsIsHere 4mo ago
  You know, I would love a feature that lets me mark push notifications as spam, and optionally send them to Apple. The last part is important for a variety of reasons, one of which is that notifications can be end to end encrypted. Spam filter push notifications. Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.
  - nickf 4mo ago
    You’re right of course, but Apple won’t do it - they’re happily running a two-tier system where Uber, eBay, Doordash can force spam notifications on you with impunity. All my settings for marketing are off - eBay still sends me notifications about coupons (and additionally there’s no way to actually contact them to complain, of course). Doordash won’t let me get delivery notifications without marketing notifications. Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a heartbeat, but they won’t.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
  like I said, you decide by muting or removing the offending app.
  - whstl 4mo ago

hithre 4mo ago

Depends. Blackberry 10 hub was strongly designed as a shared inbox instead of a loose system of notification like ios or android. And it was awesome.

ghostly_s 4mo ago

The "you" in the title's reference to "your push notifications" is not the user, it is the marketer. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this piece.

lukeschlather 4mo ago

I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.

EZ-E 4mo ago

I wish Apple would force app developers to implement different "channels" for promotional notifications vs transactional - so that you can pick and choose which ones you want.

mycall 4mo ago
In-app notifications settings should do this if they are trustworthy.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]