Hmm...when the RSS feeds first became available, I gave it a try for a while, and then ditched the idea because I couldn't quite figure out why they were useful. I think this was part of the problem...only seeing new threads really didn't tell me much about what activity was going on. I don't usually subscribe to threads either, because if I'm on the site, I can just go look at them, and I really don't like getting email notifications. BUT, if I could get an RSS feed of subscribed threads, especially if you could create a widget for a Mac to run them on the dashboard, I could just see if something interesting was going on in a subscribed thread when I didn't have my browser open. (I don't have one of those fancy phones where I can use an RSS feed or XML or whatever it is called there, but I could imagine it being useful there if I did.)
If my understanding is correct, once you get a notification that there are new posts in a subscribed thread, you don't continue getting notifications until you check the thread, and all you get is the notification, not any snippet of the actual content of the post. Is that correct? If so, then an RSS feed for subscribed threads would be more useful, because you could scan the snippets of text to see if it's something that would compel you to go back to the thread quickly to read the rest or make another comment, or perhaps clarify something you said earlier, or if it's just a noise post or something else that can wait a while.
Just as a comparison, my email software now has the option to give me a little pop-up while I'm working in another application that tells me who sent an email and the subject line. Then I know if it's something that can wait until I'm done with the other thing I'm working on, or if it's something I've been waiting for and want to respond to immediately. To me, an RSS feed is somewhat like that, just letting you know enough of the new post for each new post to decide if you want to go back to the thread now or later. Notifications are more like the old way of getting emails, where all you got was a ding to tell you there was new email, but without telling you anything about it, so you either always decided to just ignore it, or always decided to check it, and couldn't just glance at a little pop-up to make the decision.
