Areldyb [he/him]
My second proposal — and this is a wild one — is that promotional notifications should just not be allowed. Or you can opt in to them if you desperately want to hear from the Starbucks app every single day, but you should have to go out of your way to do that and should not be the default behavior when you choose “allow notifications.” Just an idea!
The author calls out the Starbucks app here, but doesn’t mention how blatantly dark-patterned its notifications really are. Android allows apps to set up multiple notification channels, so you can selectively prioritize (or, more often, mute or block) notifications based on their content. Starbucks uses this feature… to create a single channel called “Promotions & order status”. You wanted to know when your order’s ready? Fuck you and your concentration, get double stars today!
I appreciate the notification controls Android gives me, and I use them aggressively. If an app pushes a notification that doesn’t actually require my attention, I block that channel, and if it does it again, I block notifications for the whole app. I agree with the author, though: I shouldn’t need to do that.
It’s been like that. I have some uBlock rules that clean up most of it, but the last time I got on Facebook it wasn’t behaving well so I probably need to update them.
I ran a group of players through a DCC funnel this year and had a great time! Though I think we might switch to The Black Hack moving forward, just for ease of play.
I use that list as well as the ones at https://github.com/antifa-n/pihole/ (though they haven’t been updated in years). I also use OpenDNS upstream to block their “Hate/Discrimination” category (among others).
I’ve been pretty happy with this setup, but I would welcome alternatives/additional blocklists.
Would we say this is “world news”?