Notifications' Mess

Push notifications are now everywhere and apart from being super annoying, they have really become useless. By default every app (and most web pages too!) try enabling all forms of notifications by default and it takes a lot of fluency in handling phones and computers to set them up properly. Which mostly means "disable".

I think the time has come to really reverse the defaults. They should be "do not notify me about anything". And then users would be able to select the small set of really important things they want to be actively poked about.

The problem has gotten even worse as most apps / services are multi-modal - they live on PCs, phones, watches, even in earbuds. And a single event gets multiplied by being pushed to all the devices. Then some services, apart from sending a notification send an email. Which sends a notification f its own. Shopping and payment apps are the worst. "we have received your order" - "we have started processing your payment" - we have completed processing your payment" - "your order has been accepted" - "your order is being prepared"... 

Magically AliExpress is the exception here (or I managed to configure it this way). It is completely silent - you order, nothing gets emailed / pushed, except the products arrive. And BTW when the delivery is near I het on average 3 SMSes and 3 emails from the courier delivery company (Ali provides them with the numbers and addresses).

The end result is the really important stuff gets buried under a ton of unimportant crap. Last year when I was in Korea, I received an earthquake warning notification which I only read two weeks later on a sofa at home. Luckily the quake was mild.

This whole situation can be even perceived as developers' / vendors' aggression on users. Every app / service wants to be the importantest and be loud anytime and anywhere. Worse, when a service happens to get your email address (and a phone number), and then automatically subscribes you to news bulletins, starts asking for thumbs up and reviews etc. I honor reviews when they are part of the service contract, such as internet auctions. But not long ago (being lazy) I clicked on "reserve a table" in Google Maps which was handled by a 3rd party service - namely the https://zjedz.my. It is a terrible service. Yes it books you a table, but then captures you like an octopus and starts bombarding with text messages an emails and it takes really a while to untangle from it. It probably is a startup reporting the "conversion" to their investors. Lesson learned next time I will just place a traditional audio call myself. I guess the human on the other end of the line may still use a pencil and paper to mark the reserved tables and my phone number will not get through to their CRM/Spam system. At least when calling a restaurant you do not agree to 5-pages long fine print of terms of use.

I remember many, many years ago Microsoft had the idea that email recipients would require the senders to pay for email delivery (pay by having to do some computations like crypto mining). I don't remember why the idea did not go through. The world might have been different today.