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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?


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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:34PM

    by Marand (1081) on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:34PM (#393026) Journal

    Like someone else here said, subjects make a nice summary of the comment, at least in theory. In my opinion, the problem with them is that the character limit is too low, so instead of "TL;DR" all you get is "TL;"

    I don't know why the limit was chosen, but it's shit. It's not even 80 characters, which is usually a good starting point for line lengths.

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