Related older discussion: MVP: Notifications
Proposed for MVP: we notify users for:
- new answer to your question
- anything that @-addresses you (comment pings)
- edit to your post
- suggested edit to your post
- your question is closed or reopened
- gained trust level (includes welcome message for new users at TL0)
- message from moderators
- new comment on your post (see post-MVP refinement)
- voting activity on your post (could be aggregated) (will explain below)
Not MVP but later:
- answer to your question is edited
- refine comment notifications to allow muting specific posts/threads
- maybe: post you “subscribed to” is edited or gets a new answer (this covers the “downvoted and then edited” case but gives control to the user)
- email notifications after some delay
About voting activity: since votes convey information to the author and can be missed in casual use of the site, we should let the user know that a post is getting votes in either direction, even if we don’t have a reputation score. That is, this is notification of votes, not rep changes. Long-time users on SE might remember when you could get this kind of information on per-site metas; same idea. I don’t know whether we should generate an event for every vote or aggregate them, say, hourly or do something like what SE does where they become additive per post until you look at them. The how needs some design, but the what is: yes, notify people about voting activity on their own posts.
I don’t think that should extend to comments; comments will outnumber posts and that could become noisy, so if we do it at all we have to enable muting. And that’s too complicated for MVP.