We believe that you shouldn’t have to think about notifications. They should just work. As such, Sifter has always had incredibly simple notification rules. The simplicity is great in some ways, but in other ways it was too restrictive. We’ve spent an incredible amount of time thinking about how to address the shortcomings without dramatically complicate things, and add the follow/unfollow button is the first step.
Sifter explicitly doesn’t allow you to send mass notifications to the entire team because we feel that increases the noise without increasing the quality of the notifications. (Although, we are working on adding @mentions so you can ping relevant team members when commenting.) By preventing people from unsubscribing, we were also contributing to the noise. Thankfully, you can now step out of a conversation when your expertise is no longer necessary.
This change should have a meaningful impact on the quality and relevance of Sifter notifications. We know it’s only one small step, but there’s much more on the way.