Thanks for the response. In looking over my question, I see that I didn't explain myself nearly well enough, so it's entirely my fault that your answer doesn't directly address my (in my head) question, and only answered my horribly worded "out loud" question.
What I meant was that all the read alerts continue to come up when I click on the bell, and there's no way to stop them from doing that. I was curious as to whether there was a way available to change that so that you're not still looking at the long list of alerts when you just want to read the new ones. It's not a big thing, and I wasn't going to bring it up, but I figure that anytime I have a "what if" moment, it's likely that someone else has had that same moment.
For example, having read "Ian quoted...." for this post, it'll still be there the next time I pull up alerts, even though it's been read. So, the question I was so terribly trying to ask was whether or not there is a way to keep those read alerts from popping up the next time a person clicks on the bell. Again, it's not a big thing. It's just something that I thought about this morning as I was scrolling down through a bunch of new alerts from last night and having to count down the new alerts in order to get to the oldest new one.