Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:32PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:32PM (#393022)

    See, with no subject I "forced" you to read this comment, because otherwise you might be missing some of my legendary wit and wisdom (or you might be missing the chance to make fun of one of my rare mistakes...).

    Anyway "no comments" is very thinly veiled astroturfing from legacy social media that still thinks they can make a living by pimping advertisements to users. Ad selling sites need people to sit there and read everything and if no subjects means you can't skip stuff, well then they'll not be skipping my important 3rd party messages.

    As an interesting example or anecdote or data point there's a usenet group from 20+ years ago probably a sysadmin one, that was legendary for subject drift and thought it was a funny feature to "force" people to read every GD post because some subject line that started as "how to mount pdp11 dectape under ultrix" or some damn thing ended up 5000 posts later talking about SNMP v2 password permissions or something. Mostly it just successfully repelled me and most of the world from participating so there like 3 people babbling to themselves. Supposedly if the whole world "has to" be on twitter or whatever then its OK because due to network effect the lemmings have to participate and don't have the option of WTFing the failed discussion group and ignoring it.

    Or, maybe they realize we're getting to the end of yet another bubble cycle and destroying your audience doesn't matter if they're going away anyway, just like a 1978 CB radio installed in a 1977 car, so may as well sell as many anti-perspirant advertisements as possible or whatever.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:37PM (#393061)

    > See, with no subject I "forced" you to read this comment,

    No. You only forced me to read that first sentence fragment and then I realized you had gone full narcissist and stopped reading.