Oh, but you do! I’m one of those autistic people who can’t fucking stand flaming red notification icons and have to make them go away.
There’s no way to turn off the notification without either clicking “Ignore” or “Reply” (maybe it’s “Accept”). It doesn’t go away just from reading the message. I even tried to disable the element in my browser, which worked, but then it disabled the normal notification icon too.
Old Reddit is Reddit. If they get rid of it, I’m sure as fuck not sticking around for this new site. It looks like Bing and Youtube had a deformed little monster-child.