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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: 5, Interesting) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:14PM
I use the subject to figure out whether I'm interested in expanding the discussion. Subjects like "Summary is wrong", or "I ran the numbers", or whatever are usually very worthwhile reads where just putting the 200+ word comment would be really stupid.
Similarly, the Reddit Reader is worthless because there are no subjects and only usernames to click on before expanding. It is the digital equivalent of asking "Would you like to read what ILikeCheeseburgers has to say on the matter?" How the hell would I know? You've provided no hints on what they might say. I don't know who that person is...
That said, when you see a subject like "Costa Rica using green energy is really them having no power", all of the reply comment subjects are garbage, if they are given names at all. I personally *almost never* change the subject in a reply. I doubt it helps anyone to have the subject change, and don't know what I would change it to ("Nu-uh?" followed by a rebuttal?). As part of this, you end up seeing 7-12 "Re RE: original subject" comments, which is pretty much a waste of everyone's time (won't someone think of the servers!). Of course, over a decade of Slashdot has trained me to simply not read them.
Article Reply Subject - good.
Every other Subject - worthless.
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday September 01 2016, @08:55PM
God. Look at this thread for God's sake. 90+% of the comment subjects are RE: WHATEVER. Useless waste of time. Imagine a discussion where
"RE: Apples || I like apples also, who also likes apples?"
"RE: RE: Apples || I too like apples"
"RE: RE: Apples || me too!".
"RE: RE: Apples || please tell me what kind".
"RE: RE: RE: Apples || vanilla".
Is the RE:RE:RE helping anyone to understand the conversation? Because 90+% of the subjects, *even in the thread about subjects* start with this. I suspect it is as high as 99% site-wide.