If they were so invested they'd be reading the thread for people who are communicating about the topic. For people who are referring to comments or quoting other posts or didn't specifically @mention to drag a person back to look STRAIGHT AWAY lest they lose engagement.

@mentions on forums are good UX in the way that twitter @mentions are good UX - they drive clicks and opens - not engagement. They don't push good content, good conversations, good experiences. They allow people to sandbox discussions, to talk across each other. To skip volumes of content to just get their little piece.

Having the feature degrades the forum community imo, irrespective of who does and does not use it.

I'm a guy who likes old school forums though, so, you know, my opinion is probably not worth that much ;)

Seems you've had a bad experience with mentions. Maybe people have been using them in the wrong way, where you've seen them.

At work, we were using Slack, and @mentioned each other "all the time", and I'm fairly positive we would have abandoned Slack if people couldn't mention each other. Mentions are like going to the other person, and saying, "Hi, look there, you knowledeg & help is needed over here a short while". And then the other person takes a look, replies with help or status update for example.

Our mentions were related to none of driving clicks or opens or engagemenet — instead, it was about getting work done, directly rather than ... some day later when the person happened to maybe see the relevant comments.

Then you're now talking about Slack instead of a forum. They're distinct entities, with distinct purposes.

Or not, maybe the line is so blurred by now that people can't handle actual forums anymore. If I wanted a chatroom though, I'd be in a chatroom.