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12

I do however think that getting a useless notification is much better than not getting an useful one. I always enjoy reading comments and following the discussion even if I'm not personally involved; there was never a case where I thought "omg too many notifications stop bothering me"
– Andreas Bonini
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 15:59
1

@Kop: Sure, getting one useless notification is better than not getting a useful one. But what about getting 50 of them? It's easy to say that you haven't run into any problem-cases for a feature that doesn't currently exist. :P
– Aarobot
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 16:05
11

@Aaronaught I don't really see the danger of loops here. Even a heated discussion usually has 2-3 people maximum you want to reply to. I see way more junk coming up when you have to add a comment to reach each one of these people (at the moment, I'm pretty sure, the majority doesn't know about the one person limitation.)
– Pekka
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 16:33
@Pekka - I think the majority do know about the limitation. I didn't understand the twitter-style comments at all until I read the blog post about automatic notifications, which also states the 1-person limitation. I wouldn't mind seeing an example of a situation in which you'd expect separate replies to lead to a worse result than group replies.
– Aarobot
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 17:10
3

@Aaronaught the latter is simple: I hereby state that I am a Unicorn. I want everyone in this thread to learn about it so I notify
– Pekka
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 17:20
3

@Pekka (just to make the point :)
– Pekka
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 17:20
3

and @Kop ------
– Pekka
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 17:21
3

and another imaginary @Participant in this discussion.
– Pekka
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 17:21
2

End result: four comments instead of one. I realize this is not the perfect example, as you would have gotten notified anyway. The point still stands, it doesn't make sense this way.
– Pekka
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 17:21
@Pekka - contrived example, you're focusing exclusively on one person's messages and not the entire "conversation". The reality, most of the time, is that people are forced to focus their comments, rather than "broadcast" them and bring more people into the fold.
– Aarobot
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 20:49
5

@Aaronaught not true, if several people are discussing your answer, and you add a major change to it you want to make those people aware of. Happens often.
– Pekka
Commented Apr 2, 2010 at 21:45
2

@Pekka: That much is true, but I would posit that the more fundamental problem there is the inability of those people to "watch" the question, as Jon Skeet has asked for in the past (i.e. to monitor a downvoted answer to see if the author has fixed it).
– Aarobot
Commented Apr 3, 2010 at 2:05
@Aaronaught True, true. I have a suggestion in the shelf for exactly that that I think has no duplicates yet, maybe I need to dig it out.
– Pekka
Commented Apr 3, 2010 at 8:52
1

The fact that one has to manually type @username reduces the chance that someone will make noise (i.e. notify more ppl than needed).
– tshepang
Commented Feb 4, 2011 at 16:37

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