After the disaster of “mailing list mode”, which is causing our emails to get spam blacklisted for some customers – and that was largely an accident since it’s always opt-in, not a default – I’m not too enthused by having ultra-heavy notifications be the default.
I’m just going to come out and say I am strongly opposed to always being the default here until we get at least 2 months of the new first+daily like default under our belts on many discourse sites.
I think this is an unfair comparison, its not as though we are generating mails here. That said, I am done with implementing the “notify always”, which now collapses likes in the last 24 hours.
I am also seriously itching for a “close this topic for 2 months” feature 
We can revisit in 2 months
notify always enabled globally in a forum you run:After enabling that run:
./launcher enter app
rails c
> UserOption.update_all(like_notification_frequency: 0)
When I posted this feature on Stonehearth, I was asked about the Notify Always rollup of notifications. Can you share what this will look like @sam, and if it has been rolled out to business containers?
Not rolled out yet to business but active on meta and tests-passed.
I just checked in 2 more related things in this department.
Some people are just not into all this like stuff, they just want to interact based on content. On BBS someone described the likes notification as “background radiation”, some people are into it, some not.
This is not a unique problem to Discourse, for example a bunch of people on facebook complain about this as well: Facebook
On one hand, like notifications, “increase the social”, provide a “poor man’s” presence feature and so on. On the other extreme it can be simply perceived as noise. Users should be allowed to pick which end of the spectrum they are on.
So now we also have a “Never” option to complement the “Always” option.
Also, while debugging all this code I discovered there were no limits on “like/unlike/like/unlike” sequences. I added one in. There is a one minute rate limit for like/unlike sequences 4 transitions allowed per minute
Btw, in Stack Exchange I get “+5” notifications when someones upvotes a message I created 1.5 years ago - this is surely a good thing as it tell me that someone is reads that message and even cares enough to upvote it, so it encourages me to write more. I expect the same should happen with Discourse users.
It has been a few months… I tried for size all the options we have now.
This is my personal take on it.
Over the past 3 weeks I tried out completely disabling like notifications on meta. Overall it made me feel more isolated and significantly more cranky.
The like, has an enormous impact psychologically (keep doing X to keep getting likes). Turn it off and it becomes all business, you don’t know what X there is that needs more doing.
I always felt like something was missing, there was more signal and social validation that could hel.
I think the new default of notify on first like and old likes is an improvement. I feel it adds to the experience.
Sure, there are problems with notify on every like. Opening your notification window and seeing:
Can be annoying. Like notifications, though important, are not directly actionable notifications. Hiding actionable notifications here sucks.
That said I feel “my problem” is a rare problem to have. The vast majority of users will never really face it. Notify every like will, in my opinion, enrich the default experience.
Notify every like means that you get direct feedback during your first day of posting about a post. Losing this feedback arguably enriches the experience for the top 0.1% of users while negatively impacting the 99.9%.
It is also a far easier default to explain.
Perhaps we could have a custom JIT notification (in the avatar drop-down, with the other notifications) that is triggered if you receive more than X separate Like notifications in a day. It would say something like:
Woah, everyone likes you! If you’d rather not be notified about every like, you can change that under “Notify when liked” in your [settings].
I think we need some built-in discovery aid for fringe settings like these. It’s not relevant to 99.9% of users, but to the 0.1% it is quite critical, and it will cause them great annoyance if they’re never made aware of the setting’s existence.
I have the opposite experience; I get a lot of likes on old posts that really clutter up the notifications. In particular it is extremely annoying when someone goes through and likes 4-5 old posts in a row.
I noticed on one Discourse where likes are disabled, it is kind of nice to have notifications not be cluttered by likes, when you drop down notifications you know it is people speaking directly to you, not just a random like.
I think the current setting, “medium” is the correct default. People who want more, or less, should opt into it.
I think you’re still looking at this from the perspective of the 0.1%
Surely that has only happened to 0.001% of the members of this forum. Your experience is unusually skewed by the fact that even when you communities besides Meta, if it’s a tech community there’s a high chance you’ll some degree of celebrity status there.
The rest of us would still like to be notified of every piece of fan mail we receive 
Again, there’s some cool data right under our noses here. On Meta, BoingBoing, Imgur etc, what’s the daily average of received likes for:
We used to think sending thousands of emails per day to any given user was a perfectly good idea, too… until it wasn’t. The risk here of crying wolf is quite high. And since you are always notified of one like per post per day, at minimum, nothing of significance is lost.
(I actually feel even this is already a little too much as a default…)
Having an extreme default here is something I cannot support, as it runs counter to our core philosophy of safe defaults.
This isn’t even true; you already get notified about a like on your new post as soon as it happens.
What you “lose” is 5 subsequent, individual notifications that 5 other people also liked that post in the same day.
And I’d say that’s a significant loss for most folk. Having one person like a post, and having six or seven like a post are two different things to most of us, I think.
The first like is often the person to whom you’ve responded, so it could be just a “thanks for replying” kind of thing. If others start liking it, it means more than that.
I like the new default. And I’m pretty sure it’s the right default for all users of our site.
That said, I could see likes how deserve some special treatment in the drop down, eventually.
A couple of ideas:
That feels like it would lead to a really inconsistent experience.
As a user, how would I instinctively understand that likes are going to remove their blue background immediately when all other notifications do not exhibit that behavior.
As a user what if I have no other new notifications and only have likes, and in viewing the list, I see that the like happened 1 minute ago, but is way down on the list.
Or the fact that I now have notifications I’ve already seen and handled at the top of the notification list, and I have 10 likes, but only 5 are showing and are showing at the bottom of the list.
Personally, I don’t see a reason to change anything. Choose what you feel is a safe default (you can even do this as the admin of your Discourse instance), if the user doesn’t like it, they’ll change it to match their liking.
Whether notifying on the first like and then likes new on each day after is the safe default, cool. If it is notify on every like, cool.
What I’d hate to see come out of this, are changes that take us back several steps with a confusing experience or an experience that isn’t consistent across all notifications.
IMHO as long as the Dismiss All works, the way it is now is fine.
(granted, I’m at the least an order of magnitude less that the high Like receivers - once and daily works for me)
The Like icon is easy to recognize and it is possible to quickly scroll through the Notifications.
Nothing but Like Notifications and you don’t care to go to the post to clear it? Dismiss
Which is why there are badges for (n) likes that you already receive when your post starts getting a number of likes…
One very simple tweak that may alleviate a lot of the worries @codinghorror has is to automatically fold any like beyond 3 in a row.
jane liked “some awesome post”
bill liked “a different post”
pat and 3 others liked 7 posts — > links to user notifications
I think this resolves the issue of “being flooded by likes that hide actionable stuff”
With this change perhaps we can reconsider notify on every like?
Regardless, this change has general utility even for the current default.
On our forum, I have 7,188 likes - and I’ve received the “Nice Reply” badge for ten likes just twice. It’s only been awarded 18 times in total in two years, and only two other members have received it more than once. “Good Reply”, for 25 likes, has never been awarded. So I would contend that having four or five likes on a post is significant, and something worth being notified of.
Perhaps a new badge is in order?
