I know I am one of the few on this, but I don’t like notification alerts that are popping out at me. I love the “New” category because it allows me to catch up on what I missed. But, some topics aren’t for me and I wish there was a way to mark all as read or something of that nature.
There is a user setting in your profile that lets you marked how old a post has to be before it it automatically removed form the ‘New’ list without being read. The default is 2 days, but you can raise or lower this value to change your count.