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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, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:00PM
I can see why some kids these days would want to do away with subjects. They have gotten used to using shit services like Twatter, or "texting" people on their toy cell phones. They no longer know how to write a full, coherent, paragraph fully describing what they have to say. Instead, they want to fit everything in 140 characters, which makes a subject redundant.
When you have more text than that, there is the need to summarize, but the subject itself will rarely relay the full meaning of a comment. And without subjects, on a threaded comment board like this one where discussion can go off on multiple tangents, comments become more difficult to parse.
When replying to a post, it is usually filled in with something like "RE: Original topic", and often that is sufficient, but as with e-mail threads, when the discussion changes from the subject of the original topic, so should the reply subjects.
Now, forums on the other hand will normally have one subject per topic created by an original poster. Since all replies usually should fall under the same subject, in those cases each post does not need a seperate subject.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:49PM
:P