Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by johaugum 1064 days ago
> We're talking about a government notification system.

This exists, and is called Wireless Emergency Alerts. Every phone sold in the U.S. today supports this out of the box.

1 comments

Wireless Emergency Alerts are for emergencies. If you look at any government's twitter feed, the posts are either very much not emergencies, or in this post's context, too specific and numerous to use the system with. The government needs something besides a passive website and a highly active emergency alert system.
So use the alerts to instruct users to view a website or similar platform where more detail can be posted? Unless it really is an emergency, why's there a need to push so many messages to a social media feed anyway? What are they mostly about and who reads them? During Covid there was certainly at least something interesting to post fairly regularly, though nothing that wasn't already plastered all over newspaper headlines or regular TV/radio news bulletins. Even then I can't say I ever felt an additional platform was needed, and that really was an exceptional period in history.