The quality of HN threads benefits from more thought out comments and fewer reflexive replies. Notifications can promote “engagement” in the superficial sense of increasing frequency of replies, but will damage engagement in the deeper sense of decreasing depth of thought.
Is it really a thing to bash Reddit for everything?
I mean, it's not great in general, but the few subreddits I follow are much better than HN, at least nobody is telling you what's good and what is not, it's the community that regulates itself.
Isn't it possible that having a bad experience with Reddit is a “show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” more than anything else?
For any company related stuff I usually checked in regularly and also have google alerts set up.
But for casual banter, I think the no notification is a nice feature of HN and probably reduces some of the bad noise other public forums have.
That being said, still a nice feature to add for those who want it =]
Sometimes my karma randomly goes up a bit, and in investigating why, I get to go back and re-enjoy threads on articles because someone replied to something from a while ago, but most of all I like the impetuous is on me to go look for replies, I think it adds a level of friction that makes the HN experience better.
Maybe add a limit on how many 'followed threads' you could have active at the same time, so they discourage automating this behavior and make you really think if the thread is that important for you at the moment.