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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.
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?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:05PM
I wrote a regexp using FoxReplace [mozilla.org] that wipes the Subject: field any time I post. That causes soylent to throw a "Filter error: Please enter a subject" if I submit without filling in a subject. That helps remind me to write a meaningful subject for each post I make. That's because I think subjects are super useful for navigating deep threads.
Slashdot does a good job - if its just a "re: Subject" they hide the subject. But if a post has a brand new subject, then they display that.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:13PM
Slashdot does a good job - if its just a "re: Subject" they hide the subject. But if a post has a brand new subject, then they display that.
Sounds like a good thing to copy/plagiarise/rip off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:57PM
There is a problem, the link becomes tiny because it's just "Re:". Of course they "solved" it by making all the line load the reply. But if you want to do something, say open in new tab to split that conversation, the tiny size is still a problem. See Fitts's law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:34PM
Disagree strongly.
Their page display engine has not impressed me for a very long time with the way it slices and dices comments--with lengths dependent on score and how deep in the (sub)thread a comment is.
I swung by there the other day[1] and on 6 tries to get pages, I got a a Connection interrupted for 4 of those pages (and retrying didn't help).
I might be in the process of totally giving up on that site.
[1] Sometimes, someone there will write a really good headline for a topic that I had breezed past elsewhere.
...and a lack of proper subject lines is bad, particularly with long (meta)threads.
Think: scrolling way down the page to find something that you know is there.
N.B. I read with the nested view (nothing collapsed).
...and at -1, in case that hasn't been obvious.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]