Don't get us wrong, we don't want to change that. What we do want is to give some people the ability to make their experience richer. This is not for everyone but it can be helpful for some people.
Personal anecdote -- I asked a question one time but no one answered it. I deleted my question but as I was doing that Kevin Hale (a YC partner) responded back. After he posted it looked like he was talking to no-one. Fortunately, dang emailed me to notify that there was a response and asked if he could bring back my post. If I had gotten a notification about a response, this peculiar situation could have been avoided.
If you start answering some of these usability problems, you're just making it easier for all of the web's cruft to jump onto our platform.
That is not to say that things like notifications might not be useful, just that I come here more for the content and intelligent thought, and less for the social aspect.
The obvious, direct way to deal with it would be to just accept the risk and moderate as usual. There are already plenty of flame-retardant features here, I don't know that we would need more.