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Meta: Subjects are Good for You

posted by martyb on Thursday August 25 2016, @12:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the subject-to-review dept.

A 'pedantic Peter with a mobile meter' writes:

Are subjects passé in comments on the post-social media web? Or are they a valid feature to enable human eye-scanning and relevant search results?

It is the opinion of this anonymous submitter that putting "Subjects are an anachronism" [1] or "SubjectsinCommentsareStupid" [2] is unhelpful at best and spam at worst. SoylentNews has a long legacy going back to Chips & Dips, the predecessor site to Slashdot (from whose code SoylentNews was forked).

With that in mind, subjects are not a vestigial feature but a useful and defining one. It makes longer threads friendly to readers, and separates this site from Digg, Reddit, Voat, and so many other disposable social media sites. Just as email would be worse without subjects, so too would SoylentNews.

Taken from actual SoylentNews comments; cf: [1] and [2].

Ed Note: I'm of two minds as to running this story. This is presented as one person's opinion and makes a case for continuing to have a Subject for each comment. As noted, others do not feel the same way. As SoylentNews is a community, your input guides us. So, what say you? Should we continue as-is? Make subjects optional? Dispense with them entirely? Other? What benefits and/or problems are likely to result?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Thursday August 25 2016, @12:35PM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday August 25 2016, @12:35PM (#392957) Homepage Journal

    Exactly like this. The subject is the tl;dr of the comment.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   4  

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:30PM (#393088)

    Compromise, make them optional

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Thursday August 25 2016, @08:42PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday August 25 2016, @08:42PM (#393174) Homepage Journal

    TL;DR=="I'm aliterate". Fight aliteracy, READ! (Odd how the stupid spell checker thinks I'm misspelling "illiterate" and "illiteracy". Is my spell checker aliterate?)

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:30PM (#393219)

      For a moment, I though you had left out an L. [google.com]
      I was waiting for something like
      Whacko wows whole wide world with wanton wordplay. 8-)

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]