I Allowed All Web Push Notifications for a Week

You can’t escape them. Web push notifications are the new e-mail newsletter, and every site wants you to subscribe. Up until last week, I had never allowed any site to send me notifications. Because I’m curious what it’s like to have sites constantly ping you with content, I decided that for a week, I would enable all push notifications on every site that I visit.

Pre-2013, I used Google Reader to keep up with articles published by various sites. There were advantages and disadvantages. For blogs and other sources with a high signal-to-noise, it was pretty great. Unfortunately, there was no good way to keep up with general tech or world news. I subscribed to sites like The Verge, Joystiq, and Reuters, but these sources published hundreds of articles a day, of which I would only find a few interesting. Then Google Reader shutdown.

Fast-forward a few years, and I started to use Facebook as my primary general news feed. Over the years, Facebook has moved away from posts by friends and towards posts by pages ¹. While many people complain about the algorithm, I’ve actually found it to be reasonable - it manages to sort out interesting news items from the mass of sites I “like.” I also use Hacker News as a form of discovery - it’s otherwise hard to find articles out in the developer blogosphere. Finally, I still use RSS through Feedly, though I only subscribe to low volume blogs.

The experiment began on a Sunday. I quickly ended up subscribing to notifications from Facebook, Google Calendar, and other sites I frequently use. I then ended up subscribing to sites like CNET and Product Hunt. I noticed that lots of cryptocurrency news sites use push notifications. I also found that if one site used push notifications, their sister sites under the same digital media company would likely use notifications as well.

The notifications were extremely annoying, as I expected. However, I actually expected them to be worse. It turns out that most sites don’t send a push notification for every article, but only for certain articles. Still, I found that notifications interrupted me whenever I was working. I ended up using “do not disturb” mode frequently. RSS readers are a better experience in every way for keeping up with the sites you care about.

Going forward, I would not even subscribe to notifications from messaging or email tools, since I found those to be unnecessarily distracting.