Marking notifications as read/unread

This requirement, and the stickiness of the notification badge unless the user engages in extra steps - compared to the previous behavior, merely viewing the comment dropdown - generates unnecessary extra noise for the average user.

That may not be apparent from committed beta testers.

But as a regular user - SE is a Q&A feed - not a critical app.

Please keep the cognitive noise level down.

p.s. we can always look at the dropdown to see what we might have missed, so this is not fixing anything.

Marking notifications as read/unread

This requirement, and the stickiness of the notification badge unless the user engages in extra steps - compared to the previous behavior, merely viewing the comment dropdown - generates unnecessary extra noise for the average user.

That may not be apparent from committed beta testers.

But as a regular user - SE is a Q&A feed - not a critical app.

Please keep the cognitive noise level down.

Searching for "mental health research notifications" brings back plenty of hits, although many of them relate to smartphones (probably because the majority of online interactions are now through them - including potentially many SE users).

Here's one:

. In addition, the risk group featured a higher rate of error in the Go-Nogo task, due to the negative influence of smartphone push notifications on performance in both risk and nonrisk groups. Furthermore, push notifications affected subsequent performance in the risk group.

p.s. we can always look at the dropdown to see what we might have missed, so this is not fixing anything.