Does it really go away forever though? If the topics are getting lots of replies you will see them on the homepage as they get bounced to the top, no matter what.
I almost never want to dismiss unread posts, I always want dismiss topics. If I don’t want to read the 5 new replies to that topic now, why would I want to read the 3 new additional replies to it tomorrow? On top of that, I would be reading the bottom most 3 replies without any of the context of the previous 5 replies I dismissed, which disassociates me from the topic even more.
It just feels really wrong to me to encourage
Getting nagged more in the future about something I already do not want to be nagged about right now.
Coming back later with partial context and having not read (X) replies to this topic.
I am fine to switch the default so it is checked by default, my big pain point is that I just never remember what the diff is between dismiss posts and topics
Spelling it out in a very clear way makes it much less confusing
I’m in favour of dismiss unread posts as the default, i.e. leaving the box unchecked.
It’s in line with all kinds of “mark as read” behaviour you see elsewhere. You don’t expect this kind of “clear queue” button to do anything except remove this stuff from view until there’s new content to consume. That’s how Google Inbox “Mark done” works, GitHub notifications etc.