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by saurik 1878 days ago
So don't allow those notifications. I can easily see the existence of a catch-all deny everything by default as well. Safari on desktop happens to have this feature--showing Apple isn't categorically against its existence, as long as it doesn't help undermine their app store monopoly--will occasionally ask me for notifications and, somehow, I always deny them... maybe I have more willpower than you? Just because you have some personality flaw that prevents you from disabling a feature you don't like shouldn't mean that everyone else in the world needs to do without having that feature ever. In a world where Apple doesn't just make quality judgements on content but also makes legal judgments and even moral judgments--being so anti-porn as to be downright misogynistic with an anti-breastfeeding stance--this is a reasonable feature to exist on the web platform, and no one is forcing you to use it.
1 comments

The challenge is that the notification acceptance rate is so low on mobile devices that it makes it meaningless to implement such features [1]. Practically, user is most likely to accept notifications from sites that they interact with a lot. Those also happen to be the sites whose app user is willing to install. Thus, the notification feature on web is not something that a lot of users require.

> This is a reasonable feature to exist on the web platform

Not really? [1] indicates that notification prompts actually result in users navigating away from webpages clearly demonstrating that this is a user hostile feature.

[1] https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/04/01/reducing-notific...

As pointed out in the linked article, the stats conflate unwelcome/unrequested notification prompts (e.g. Reddit, which pops up the prompt the first time you open the website (or used to anyway)) and cases where the user explicitly requests/opts in to notifications. I feel like the latter is something that proper web apps that don't utilize dark patterns could make very good use of. Consider the 85% acceptance rate for the camera/microphone prompt; few websites request camera/microphone permissions in the same intrusive way as they request notification permissions, hence it's not declined as often.