I don’t know about that. I would like to hear about themes and components, or when something happends on documents and bugs as well, so I’m Watcing First Post. But if I’m interested in a topic and its posts I’ll start following — I change notifications quite fast to Normal, here anyway, but I’m reading almost every topic here (except dev-thing, because they are using some strange language, close to english, but not)
My forum is general one, but its ground is builded on dogs, I’m using only four categories, plus two metas, but we are strongly trusting on tags.
So under one category will pile up a lot of stuff, but everything rarely interesting everyone I teached my users two things:
- how to mute tags, because it is the most effective way to cut down annoying noise, but also
- how to follow perhaps interesting topics using Watching First Post
I have an user who is triggered easily about… well, quite many things, but otherwise he is really easy going, knows a lot and writes well. So he has muted all potentially explosive tags like politic related, but he is using Watching First Post and email notification from tags like hiking and paddling.
So from my point of view Watch First Post works really well when there is enough activity and proper using of tags.
And yes, I know. Off topic, again, because I was talking about what users are doing, and we should discuss about defaults. But still 