Context is king. If there's vital/time-dependent correspondence you're waiting on, notifications can matter. But email in 2024 is pretty darn transactional, in which case a daily check is enough for most. Notifications for something suggest that I need to drop what I'm doing and attend to whatever arrived. That just doesn't apply for service provider marketing, purchase receipts, etc.

And then the opsec angle comes into play: https://www.axios.com/2023/12/06/apple-google-requests-push-notification-data

Give me a mandatory field and I will give you a latrine.

then a few years later suddenly everyone's anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.

There used to be a satire sub called Church of the Current Thing that made fun of this phenomenon. It eventually got banned around 2022 thanks to a cohort of bad faith actors mass-filing dubious reports of subs they didn't like.

(I believe there was also a sub devoted to cataloging all such subs that got paved over in the name of le brand safety^TM^, but it may have also gone the same way. I don't keep up with the place)

It's worth noting that investment in community isn't the problem per se. People's digital lives (indeed their digital personhood) are arguably more important than their corporeal ones now; the ability to sustainably organize online around everything from hobbies to political goals matters. The problem is we collectively keep picking the corporate-run shitware to build on, like Reddit - platforms over which we're excluded from any sort of influence, where the only real currency is perverse incentive.

Notifications are overrated. I turn them off for the bulk of apps.

Devote one or two small time windows each day for life admin. Outside those windows it shouldn't be seen or heard.

When is the company axing search?

I'm convinced Adobe's acquisition activity is driven primarily by elimination of alternatives to the SaaS subscription model, as opposed to revenue growth. Adobe is okay with viable competition, but they are not okay with viable competition that offers an alternate payment and delivery model that doesn't view the customer as an open wallet. That's when the polonium tea comes out, because letting that run spells industry exodus.

It makes me wonder what the US DOJ/FTC/relevant regulator thinks. Perhaps they don't care at all because (unlike Adobe's userbase) we realize this sector is as un-vital as it gets. The Stockholm syndrome on display is sad nevertheless.

It makes you wonder why Google pursues initiatives like Web Environment "Integrity", given that proprietary mobile apps for the most part have already completed the hatchet job on user agency and privacy.

An open app simply is another type of browser tab, in my books. From a 'screen cruft' perspective I consider them roughly equivalent. At any rate it's an interesting aspect of software design psychology...

This is how you effectively combat the interests trying to kill libraries, filesharing and the public commons in general. Continue normalizing the activity, as it makes law designed to attack it all the more odious and unworkable. The bad guys lose when cultural attitudes rally around free information exchange. The key to that is being public and vocal like the dev.

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On the plus side, UBO only had to block one script (on the login page at least).

Alt. headline: Uncle Sam ropes in Australia and Google in latest China African containment initiative