Generally I open the notifications and if I’ve to reply I do it from there only. Then I open something else. Notification count doesn’t go away automatically and ‘mark all as read’ has to be clicked. It’d be nice if the notification count disappears after the user open them once.
i may be in the minority, but i like leaving them up and manually marking them complete. I use it as a little reminder that i want to respond to a comment
seconding liking manual. it’s way better than automatically marking as read, imo. because then you can come back to it later.