<this represents my personal opinion and in no way is anything official>
On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 1:17 PM, Diego Moya dialmove@gmail.com wrote:
The feature shouldn't be "notify on all posts on the subscribed thread" either. I don't want to be notified every time a new thread appears at any one of my watched pages. I have about 3000 pages in my watchlist, and receive around 400 updates daily only from talk pages, which 50 or so come from unique pages; getting all those as notifications would render Echo useless to me. Apparently this volume of data was not taken into account when designing the notification feature that was rolled out this week, and it is still ignored in the redesign proposals that I've seen at the various forums.
I wouldn't want that either. But maybe newbies would; that should probably be studied, if notifying newbies of new conversations on their watched talk pages is beneficial or not.
As for people like us, it seems there's already an opt-out in the form of going to Special:Preferences and turning off "flow" notifications. That could be made clearer that that's what it does, though.
I agree that the ability to select specific threads or boards for notification without doing it for every watchlisted board/thread would be even better. But that seems like a lower priority, since watchlists still work.