@codinghorror, I love Discourse. I was just trying to explain the reason why the notifications may be a source of confusion.
I’m used to a notification system on a Mac, which is very unobtrusive. This makes me biased towards it.
Thank you for the tip on hiding notifications with CSS.
.notifications ul li.read {display: none;}
completely removes the dismissed and read notifications from the menu and resizes the list accordingly.
You can still see the complete notification log at [your-domain]/u/[user-name]/notifications