If you want to propose an alternative that is not contingent on desperately and continuously tracking your reddit karma, go for it.
Fix the alternatives you want people to use before you kill the thing people are using.
The Watched Threads feature sucks. Many people have aired their grievances with it in this thread, but my personal issues with it are that sometimes you don't get notified about new replies, or you get notified
once and never again. If it's a slower thread, and you checked all the other notifications and forgot about that one, and it sinks to the bottom of the watched threads list, you're probably going to forget about it.
What's the solution to this? Should watched threads constantly notify you that a thread you haven't caught up with has new replies? That sounds retarded because maybe the user hasn't forgotten about it, but just won't check for whatever reason, so that would just be spammy. Reactions received was a little gentle reminder for those who needed it. A less intrusive way of seeing if a thread had activity since it was
you choosing to go to the page, rather than receiving notifications or having a giant box on the front page that puts the forum list out of view.
I already mentioned this in the thread, but fix bookmarks as well. It still boots you to the front page every time you want to remove one and it makes me not want to use them at all if I can't organise them without it becoming an annoying and time-consuming process. I got bookmarks on threads I never got around to catching up with or even reading at all rotting away past the first page of my bookmarks lists because the first page is full of bookmarks on posts I've already read and don't need to read again, from threads I've already caught up with. I don't know if there's a bug that makes it so it doesn't register that I removed a bookmark sometimes, or if it's that I simply forget to take it off when I go and check on a thread through the watched feature and forget to scroll up to take it off, but either way the site is harder to use because of it.
What about another way to get notified or reminded of threads you haven't been to in years, that you never watched or bookmarked? Is it so wrong to want to casually revisit an old classic that you forgot existed? Should we only care about the most recent and most active threads? Facebook has a gay nigger feature like this called "memories", but it's gay and niggerish and I don't know how you would implement something like this without making it homosexual, forced, and melanated.
The sticker notifications/reactions received worked great for this. Again, it wasn't intrusive because it wasn't happening all the time, it was something you could opt out of and choose whether or not you wanted to see, and most importantly, you only received react notifs for old threads if someone was actually reading your shit, rather than some annoying "hey take a look back at this thing from x years ago!". But I won't sperg out about "oh but I liked X thing you could do with this feature, it was fun" since you don't care about that. My main point is that having to tediously update a catalogue to figure out what threads you really
really want to watch is annoying. It's even more annoying when you can't even do it in one go, you can't do it while you're reading a thread, you instead have to drop everything and let the page refresh to the front page for every 1 bookmark you want to get rid of, to then go back to the bookmarks menu, go back to the page you were on, so you can get booted to the front page again so you can repeat the whole process.
Also, is it right to even offer the premium stickers for T&H at this point? I know that the stickers should be seen as a bonus for donating rather than "I'm giving you money to pay for the stickers", but obviously the stickers are there as an incentive to donate. What's the point of giving someone SemperFi or Drink! if they're never going to see it? I really think these serve no purpose if the person you're giving it to doesn't even know you're giving it to them. They're basically a fancy "Agree" and "Winner", and it's not like they hold any special status for highlights. At this point, you might as well replace ratings with just 3-- "highlight-worthy (informative)" "highlight-worthy (funny)" and "this post was shit kill yourself".
