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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 Reziac on Friday August 26 2016, @04:08AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Friday August 26 2016, @04:08AM (#393330) Homepage

    My eye evidently uses titles as the EOF marker for the previous comment... I noticed earlier that I unintentionally skipped over the comments where someone had used WJ to dissolve the subject line entirely, and on first pass I only "saw" the last one in the chain, being bounded by the following subject.

    So if you want me to NOT READ your comment, by all means, omit the subject.

    I use the title in various other ways, too -- the usual one of quickly determining interest, searching for whatever, etc.

    I can't always be arsed to think up a good title for a post, and having to do so is a nuisance. Generally I'd rather piggyback on an existing subject line.

    Meta: It ain't broke. Don't fix it.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
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