(manually quoting below because it doesn’t seem I can quote a post if the topic is closed):
Notify Feature can be easily abused - #63 by sam
Sam:
From the inception of meta we have 377 usages of this feature.
In the last week it was used 5 times .2 times to notify an anonymous user.
1 time to bug @codinghorror about the topic discussing this feature
1 time to test on discobot
1 time which may or may not be legit.Feature is mostly abandonware and for very good reason.
If I recall correctly, the notify button previously only showed up on the share topic dialog, not the share post dialog, so I wonder if that also contributed to why people didn’t use it. For example, I only discovered it existed a little bit before it was removed and I think that’s because I tend to share posts more than full topics.
Also, if it only existed similar to a poke button, that may have impacted its usage. So I’m not sure if people didn’t use it because they didn’t want to or they found it lacking the ability to add more context.
Here on Meta, I don’t have much desire to share privately with people. Honestly, I know so few people here, I’d probably feel uncomfortable sharing something privately with them or even publicly tagging them, and I wonder if that’s similar for other people on Meta.
However, on the communities I’m building, I feel a much stronger desire to have private side conversations of a main topic. A way to ping someone I know well to pay attention to the topic without having to call the group’s attention to that person. If I want them to contribute, I think it can make sense to publicly call them out—however, even then, I tend to not like to publicly mention people because then they can feel forced to reply even if they don’t want to.
I wonder if the nature of the community and the nature of the discussion influences whether people would use a feature like this. That being said, if Discourse doesn’t see it as a priority, maybe it can be a plugin/theme component.