20 years later and still looking for this functionality. Oh well, maybe in another 10 years it will be reconsidered  

Here we are in 2024 and we are still wishing that we had this option.

What I find a bit mad with this is that because the feature doesn't exist admins have to create automations to do it so ultimately Jira get more money as it's bumps up the amount of automations we use i.e. higher bracket licence = more automations you can run each month. 

Seems a little unfair.

Whoa whoa whoa, let me get this straight. Jira admins have been requesting this feature a dozen times over 15 years and Atlassian "...do not reasonably expect to implement it in any future iteration of JIRA." Instead they want users to take an extra step of also making a comment with the user tagged so they know they were added as a Watcher?

They call that "sufficient" but you know what I call that?  LAZY!

I cant believe I'm going to have to manually script this when the system can easily do an action -> email.

"We've made the decision to close this request, as we do not reasonably expect to implement it in any future iteration of JIRA. Adding another event that triggers an email notification adds more complexity to JIRA's notification system. The existing options for notifying a user about an issue (using the Share button or @mentioning them in a comment) are sufficient in most cases and leverage existing patterns."

Just once I would like to come across one of these feedback issues and see Atlassian comment "Yes, we agree and will fix this issue immediately!". The problem is we're all using Jira when we should clearly be using something else that actually does what we need.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for voting and commenting on this issue. Your feedback is key to helping us understand how you use JIRA so we can continue improving your experience. We have reviewed this issue over the last few days.

We've made the decision to close this request, as we do not reasonably expect to implement it in any future iteration of JIRA. Adding another event that triggers an email notification adds more complexity to JIRA's notification system. The existing options for notifying a user (using the Share button or @mentioning them in a comment) are sufficient in most cases and leverage existing patterns.

I understand that our decision may be disappointing. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Dave Meyer
dmeyer@atlassian.com
Product Manager, JIRA Platform

Hi, I know that watchers and voters here would prefer to have this as a core feature but Atlassian does not seem to implement it any time soon.

Our tiny though award-winning add-on Bug Watcher Notifications provides this (and a lot more) as a special feature of its Issue Watchers custom field type. This is how it works.

Sorry for the confusion. I don't work for Atlassian, I was speaking from the point of view of another deployed instance of JIRA.

And I meant that my organization has considered removing the ability for any user to "manage watchers" in order to add other people to the watch list for an issue. The @mention and auto-watch features have reduced (but not eliminated) the need for us to manually add a list of people to a watch list.

I would echo what Ryan just said. Please do not remove the ability to add other watchers.

Alex, if you are saying you would remove the ability to add watchers from Jira (and not just change the Manage Watchers permission for your organization), I would strongly recommend against that. We have lab personnel and also sales people that interact more via email than logging in. They may not respond to a ticket but want to see when others do. They appreciate when our customer service, marketing, etc. add them as watchers.