[oftenwrong]

My thoughts exactly. I have notifications disabled for everything aside from personal communication from my contacts. I bet a lot of HN users are the same. Don't listen to HN users preferences unless we are your target audience.

Most people seem to be tolerant of notifications. I also suspect most people do not know how to prevent receiving notifications. In public (for example, on the train) I see people receiving many notifications, checking most of them, and manually dismissing the rest.

To build engagement you will want to notify people. However, there is a fine line between a tolerable amount of notifications and an annoying amount of notifications. I would suggest:

1. Make your users feel like the notifications are always a result of their own choice. For example, a notification for something they chose to follow is likely to be tolerated. A notification for something they did not choose to follow will be more likely to be seen as annoying notification spam.

2. Make it really easy for a user to stop notifications in a fine-grained way, or to receive them less frequently. Ideally, they could do this directly after clicking-through the notification (or on the notification itself, if possible). This gives users a way to keep your service from breaching their tolerance threshold, and may therefore prevent them from leaving your service altogether.

[tridenrake]

This is a really helpful insight. Thank you.