It sucked before too. Certain types of notification were only viewable in the app. If you had one, it would give you an orange envelope on the mobile site, but nothing new could be seen inside. And it wouldn't even tell you what's happening so I just wrote off the entire notification system as broken. So if I got a reply on Reddit I wouldn't know because there's no indication. I still won't ever install the app and I'm now less likely to do so because I hate push notifications.