I work at Discourse; there is new functionality coming in the 2.6 release to address this issue, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/let-experienced-users-skip-new-.... When you join a new community you will be able to click an option that skips all of the Discobot tutorial and the new user badge notifications (which are the basic ones like First Like).
This is great! Can I opt out of all badges or only "basic ones".
Of course it will be a decade before everyone updates to a version that supports this option and allows the user to enable it. In the meantime we'll have our time and attention wasted for years (T_T)
There's another, automatically getting spammed with emails and then having to manually opt-out. I get you want it to be frictionless but when signing up a opt-in checkbox for email would respect my time and scarce attention than opting me into daily emails and forced me to later opt-out.
And sorry to pick on Discourse. There's tons of other offenders but Discourse is one most people on HN have experience with. Steam/Xbox/Playstation all have the same issue. Wasted time and attention required for things I don't care about. The worst is the OS popping up achievement notifications right over the climax of some scene. That others care is fine. Just let me turn them off because "Attention is your scarcest resource".
@greggman3 Congratulations on your new Discourse badge "Differentiator" for replying to a feature request with a new feature request.
Disclaimer: Not a real badge, and I don't use Discourse. Sounds like the developers are very responsive, and it's probably a good tool, this was just easy and fun.
What is particularly nice about hacker news is that this comment didn’t actually generate a notification. OP has to actively decide “I want to look at that conversation again”, and then navigate to it.
It’s actually quite nice, I only remembered I posted this comment just now and I came back and saw it had some upvotes and extra comments which was a nice surprise.
That automatic email issue is an interesting one, I will take a look and see if there are similar complaints or internal discussions. I know we have some ideas about letting users choose which categories they are tracking on signup instead of auto opt in, emails would be another great thing to do this with (I have turned off email notifications for the Discourse forums I am a member of FWIW.). Thanks for the extra comments!
