Forum Update: Notifications (March 2025)

This is a mini Forum update to catch you up on a few changes we have made to the notification system recently. TL;DR:

1. Karma notifications are now real-time by default
2. You can now set separate batching settings for email and on-site notifications. E.g. receive notifications for “Replies to my comments” immediately on-site, but batched daily by email
3. We have updated many of the default settings for email notifications (see list)

Our motivation for the majority of these changes is to make the notification system better match people’s expectations from using other sites. For instance, we heard from multiple users that we should send more email notifications by default.

In cases where we have changed the default settings, this has only been applied to users who had never updated the setting themselves. You can check your account settings to see if this has been applied to you, and to update the settings to how you like them.

Karma notifications

Karma notifications now default to being shown in real-time rather than batched daily.

The reasoning behind the initial daily batching was to prevent the notifications from being overly addictive. We looked at the stats on how many votes the typical user receives, and 97% of users average less than 1 vote per day^[1], so we decided the daily batching was solving a problem only for a small number of power users. If you are a power user and preferred getting the notifications daily, I encourage you to update your settings.

We’ve also added “Today” and “This week” sections so that you don’t lose the notifications after looking at them:

Separate batching settings for email vs on-site notifications

You can now set separate batching settings for email and on-site notifications:

We’ve also updated many of the defaults for emails, mostly to add at least a daily email for notifications you might otherwise miss. Here’s a list of all the changes (the on-site settings have stayed the same and are “immediately” for all the ones listed here):

Other small changes

1. You will now get notifications of replies-to-replies to your comments (up to 5 comments away from your most recent comment), rather than just direct replies. Note: We've had reports that this is confusing as currently implemented, I'm planning to update the wording to make it clear when it's a direct vs indirect reply.
2. We noticed that “Posts added to tags I'm subscribed to” was generating way too many notifications, so we have updated our onboarding flow to not nudge people to create these subscriptions. We are also planning to retroactively unsubscribe people who subscribed to tags during onboarding and don’t appear to be clicking the notifications.
   
   In the meantime, if you find these annoying you can unsubscribe from tags yourself in the Manage Subscriptions page. Tags you are subscribed to will appear under “Notification of new posts with tags” (this heading won’t appear if you don’t have any). You can also turn off this type of notification entirely here.

Share your feedback

Thank you for reading! We would love to hear any feedback or questions you have about these changes. You can comment on this post or reach out to us another way. You can also share feature requests in the feature suggestion thread.

1. ^{^}

    Among users who received any votes in the last year