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TL;DR: 9,000 notifications in 25 days! Notifications are evil. Or, they can be... Flo by Moen: I have received nearly 9,000 emails from Flo between January

TL;DR: 9,000 notifications in 25 days! Notifications are evil. Or, they can be... Flo by Moen: I have received nearly 9,000 emails from Flo between January 24th and today, February 17th. Yes, that is an average of 360 emails per for 25 days. Curious? Read on. Our insurance company had us install a water leak sensor device made by Moen called "Flo": https://www.moen.com/search/smart+water https://www.moen.com/search/smart+water My opinion (and just my opinion) it's a piece of garbage, a waste of time and money. With that out of the way... This thing alerts you when it detects various event. It's supposed to be smart? Nah, actually, it's dumb as &*ck. Example: One of my kids decided a 1.5 hour shower was a good idea. Flo shutoff the water to the entire house at 90 minutes. If this had been a broken pipe in the walls, running for 90 minutes, well, the damage would easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is stupid. It protects nothing. The only scenario where that would have had some value might be if you go on vacation for a week and a water pipe breaks. OK, well, I generally shutoff the water when we go on vacation, so there is no value to this device. One of the particular notifications has to do with water pressure. Flo sends you an alarm to your phone (via their app) and via email when it exceeds a certain value. We have always had high water pressure. By always I mean, over twenty years. No problems at all. I like this. High water pressure is useful. Flo does not like it. I probably get no less than ten notifications per day on the app about water pressure. You can snooze them for 24 hours on the app. So, I have to deal with these nonsense notifications every single day. And I can't tell Flo "this is normal, forever, don't bug me". Email? As I said at the top, about 360 emails per day, on average, for high water pressure. I now have a collection of nearly 9,000 of these email notifications received during the last 25 days. Evil.

warrenm 5y ago
I didn't say you should get 9000 emails in 25 days I said there should be a way to see that you have replies to a submission or comment so you know someone's looking for your response
- robomartin 5y ago
  This was not a reply to what you said. It is a real-life example of how evil notification can be. Probably the most extreme example I have ever seen. As for your comment, I understand. I went 11 days before posting the above reply. I was really busy with work. Frankly, I appreciate that HN does not have notifications. Most of what we all discuss in online forums, going back to my days on USENET, isn't important enough to consume the clock cycles. Notifications would just make us waste more time. Yes, I am calling most of it a waste of time. If I was pressed to pick a number I would say that 1% to 5% might have some value. This might sound harsh. Take it as one person's opinion, which means it has little value and isn't at all relevant to your own context.

warrenm 5y ago

I didn't say you should get 9000 emails in 25 days I said there should be a way to see that you have replies to a submission or comment so you know someone's looking for your response

robomartin 5y ago
This was not a reply to what you said. It is a real-life example of how evil notification can be. Probably the most extreme example I have ever seen. As for your comment, I understand. I went 11 days before posting the above reply. I was really busy with work. Frankly, I appreciate that HN does not have notifications. Most of what we all discuss in online forums, going back to my days on USENET, isn't important enough to consume the clock cycles. Notifications would just make us waste more time. Yes, I am calling most of it a waste of time. If I was pressed to pick a number I would say that 1% to 5% might have some value. This might sound harsh. Take it as one person's opinion, which means it has little value and isn't at all relevant to your own context.