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?
Related Stories
The Washington Post has an article asking the question "Which languages will dominate the future?" The answer depends on your interests: making money in growth markets; speaking with as many people as possible; speaking only one language while traveling; or learning about culture. As you might imagine, the article concludes
There is no one single language of the future. Instead, language learners will increasingly have to ask themselves about their goals and own motivations before making a decision.
[...] In a recent U.K.-focused report, the British Council, a think tank, identified more than 20 growth markets and their main languages. The report features languages spoken in the so-called BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — that are usually perceived as the world's biggest emerging economies, as well as more niche growth markets that are included in lists produced by investment bank Goldman Sachs and services firm Ernst & Young.
"Spanish and Arabic score particularly highly on this indicator," the British Council report concluded for the U.K. However, when taking into account demographic trends until 2050 as laid out by the United Nations, the result is very different.
Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Indonesian will dominate much of the business world by 2050, followed by Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian. If you want to get the most money out of your language course, studying one of the languages listed above is probably a safe bet.
Late for work in Manhattan, you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change. You finally get a green light, cross the street, arrive at the office, get in the elevator and hit the close door (>|<) button to speed things along. Getting out on your target floor, you find that hurrying has you a bit hot under the collar, so you reach for the thermostat to turn up the air conditioning.
Each of these seemingly disconnected everyday buttons you pressed may have something in common: it is quite possible that none of them did a thing to influence the world around you. Any perceived impact may simply have been imaginary, a placebo effect giving you the illusion of control.
In the early 2000s, New York City transportation officials finally admitted what many had suspected: the majority of crosswalk buttons in the city are completely disconnected from the traffic light system. Thousands of these initially worked to request a signal change but most no longer do anything, even if their signage suggests otherwise.
[...] Today, a combination of carefully orchestrated automation and higher traffic has made most of these buttons obsolete. Citywide, there are around 100 crosswalk buttons that still work in NYC but close to 1,000 more that do nothing at all. So why not take them down? Removing the remaining nonfunctional buttons would cost the city millions, a potential waste of already limited funds for civic infrastructure.
More examples are quoted in linked article, and some suggestions how tech can make our lives more pleasant while waiting - Pong anyone?.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by damnbunni on Thursday August 25 2016, @12:27PM
Keep the subjects; they're handy. Especially on those wall-of-text comments.
(Score: 4, Informative) by jdavidb on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:01PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @12:30PM
n/t
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Thursday August 25 2016, @12:35PM
Exactly like this. The subject is the tl;dr of the comment.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:30PM
Compromise, make them optional
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday August 25 2016, @07:30PM
Poifect.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Funny) by mcgrew on Thursday August 25 2016, @08:42PM
TL;DR=="I'm aliterate". Fight aliteracy, READ! (Odd how the stupid spell checker thinks I'm misspelling "illiterate" and "illiteracy". Is my spell checker aliterate?)
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:30PM
For a moment, I though you had left out an L. [google.com]
I was waiting for something like
Whacko wows whole wide world with wanton wordplay. 8-)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pTamok on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:05PM
Comments without subjects are like books without titles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:42PM
And web pages without titles.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:05PM
I wrote a regexp using FoxReplace [mozilla.org] that wipes the Subject: field any time I post. That causes soylent to throw a "Filter error: Please enter a subject" if I submit without filling in a subject. That helps remind me to write a meaningful subject for each post I make. That's because I think subjects are super useful for navigating deep threads.
Slashdot does a good job - if its just a "re: Subject" they hide the subject. But if a post has a brand new subject, then they display that.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:13PM
Slashdot does a good job - if its just a "re: Subject" they hide the subject. But if a post has a brand new subject, then they display that.
Sounds like a good thing to copy/plagiarise/rip off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:57PM
There is a problem, the link becomes tiny because it's just "Re:". Of course they "solved" it by making all the line load the reply. But if you want to do something, say open in new tab to split that conversation, the tiny size is still a problem. See Fitts's law.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:34PM
Disagree strongly.
Their page display engine has not impressed me for a very long time with the way it slices and dices comments--with lengths dependent on score and how deep in the (sub)thread a comment is.
I swung by there the other day[1] and on 6 tries to get pages, I got a a Connection interrupted for 4 of those pages (and retrying didn't help).
I might be in the process of totally giving up on that site.
[1] Sometimes, someone there will write a really good headline for a topic that I had breezed past elsewhere.
...and a lack of proper subject lines is bad, particularly with long (meta)threads.
Think: scrolling way down the page to find something that you know is there.
N.B. I read with the nested view (nothing collapsed).
...and at -1, in case that hasn't been obvious.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:09PM
n/t
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:11PM
(nothin' 'ere, mate)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:14PM
(why'd you look? You knew there'd be nothing here.)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:29PM
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:33PM
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:11PM
(Score: 3, Touché) by TheRaven on Friday August 26 2016, @08:16AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:30PM
➡➡➡ ㊙😉😶😶😶☑☑☑
⛅
⛪✌❤☕
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:26PM
Shaka, when the walls fell.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:47PM
😂✅✅
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anne Nonymous on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:43PM
Why not make them optional?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:49PM
For new top-level posts, definitely not. A post without a subject (inherited or not) is like a commit with no commit message. Laziness should not be encouraged.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:01PM
For replies, yes, that could be an option,
It already is an option, and not just for replies. It will remain that way until the lameness filter starts parsing output instead of input. This not an opinion pro or con, simply a statement of fact. The title of this comment was input as follows:
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:16PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by YorithTheDreamer on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:44PM
This is my first comment explicitly because titles are great for lurkers. I quite like having headers and wish replies had them used more.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 25 2016, @01:50PM
When somebody replies to one of your comments, you see the subject and can tell what they're replying to, instead of just blindly clicking the link to find out.
But then again, people like OriginalPoster don't even have accounts at all, so I guess tracking isn't a universally-appreciated feature.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:19PM
...but I do use the search engine from time to time and subject lines are useful there.
A No-subjects paradigm would make that more cumbersome.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(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.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by xorsyst on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:23PM
I find them unnecessary. My eye doesn't see/read them, they're just a spacer. Which would be fine, except that sometimes the comments make no sense without reading the subject first.
So I say get rid of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:37PM
Then maybe you should get your eye fixed.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by godshatter on Thursday August 25 2016, @06:29PM
I was going to mention this as well. When scanning the page, my eye jumps directly to the next comment text and I don't even register the subject line, which is why comments that start in the subject are so annoying to me. I think my eye skips it because I read all the comments from top to bottom and reading the subjects sort of breaks the flow, if that makes any sense.
I would suggest leaving them, though. It doesn't make sense to me not to have them, and when I am looking for a particular comment I read earlier and want to reply to, reading the subjects can help me find it even if I didn't really notice the subject when I read it. Assuming the subject matches the comment to some extent.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday August 26 2016, @04:08AM
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:29PM
I don't know how many others find it difficult to follow some threads in which the actual topic under discussion changes slightly but the subject headers are just Re:blah blah blah, but I find it spoils the flow of some conversations when commenters are not all talking about the same thing but haven't bothered to indicate it as such by a change of subject.
I much prefer to have a useful subject for each comment but that also requires a change in individual attitudes rather than just a blanket decision to keep or remove them. I agree with FatPhil and others in their comments earlier - the subject headers are an important (to me) part of the thread discussion. I cannot change those who do not agree or are simply too lazy to type something, but I am more likely to read a discussion that has subjects rather than a long stream of Re: blah
(Score: 3, Touché) by FatPhil on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:30PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:31PM
I'm not trying to be a pedantic asshole (at the moment), I just think this is useful to know: Disagree is +0.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 26 2016, @09:58AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:32PM
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.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:37PM
> 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.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:34PM
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.
(Score: 2, Funny) by DavePolaschek on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:37PM
I think this is the first article in which I've looked at all of the subjects on the comments in... forever.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ilPapa on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:41PM
If you can't write a good subject line, you should leave commenting to us experts. It takes a very tiny fraction of a second to scan a subject line and get its meaning, and for the writer, it helps focus the point. Assuming you have a point, which in my case is not always true.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:37PM
Assuming you have a point, which in my case is not always true
Well, Your Holiness, I think it's useful when you say that Capitalism is an obsolete system.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zinho on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:50PM
...people start a sentence in the subject and complete it in the message body. Drives me nuts. We seem to have weeded that behavior out of this community with peer pressure, though, so that's happy ;)
Despite my comment above, I like having subjects for comments. I browse at threshold/breakthrough of -1/4, so the page loads quickly and I can skim the subjects to see the flow of conversation at a glance before digging in. I'm also favorable towards changing the subject of a reply to indicate a shift in direction for the conversation, and I wish more people would use it that way.
There are lots of benefits for me in keeping the subjects, and my one pet peeve is a trivial annoyance in comparison. I'd vote to keep.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:57PM
The punch line goes here.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:59PM
I suppose this is an old idea. Seen it in email apps and web pages for years. Why not just take the first line or sentence or 140 characters of every comment and display them in a larger font in bolder colors? People would get used to the system. Can still have subjects for those who want to write them, and those who hate making a subject wouldn't have to be bothered.
Would want to exclude control characters so pranksters can't embed huge gaps of whitespace by starting with a bunch of CR/LF characters.
(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
(Score: 2, Disagree) by MrGuy on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:24PM
A referendum on a question like "do you like having subjects on an article?" is the wrong question, to me. Some people read the subject line, and some don't. But quite a few probably don't care.
If (as is slightly implied) you want to make a decision "Should we remove the feature to have a subject for a post," the proper way to get an answer is to give at least the following three options:
* I find subjects to be a useful feature.
* I don't really care about subjects
* I find subjects actively annoying/problematic
There's a difference between "I don't use them" and "I dislike them," and conflating those groups will lead to artificially overcounting the "opposed" group.
Example: What if 40% of users find subject lines useful, 50% don't really care, and 10% hate them. Counting that as a 6-to-4 vote "against" subjects would be the wrong conclusion (as would counting it as a 9-to-1 vote in favor of keeping subjects, if the question was "Do you want us to remove the subjects feature?")
If the group is strongly polarized (a lot of people REALLY like it, a lot REALLY hate it), then maybe consider a feature to let users customize as opposed to a blanket in/out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:26PM
seems we hit peak "subject".
newspapers and magazines are complaining:"stop using up the precious limited subject space!"
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:39PM
(Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:58PM
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @06:51PM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @06:59PM
unicode "word joiner" [fileformat.info] in the subject line seems to be responsible for this thread's worth of missing subject links when the child posts are collapsed to just subject lines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:41PM
there. it'd be crazy to drop them.
inherit them from the parent (including the op's title) and allow overrides so people can indicate nuance.
p.s. stop listening to people that don't understand what they are trying to simplify. its hard enough to bear seeing my window manager, browser and distro devolve by the dictatorship of the majority. don't do this here!
(and please pad page-sizes to packet-sizes)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by loic on Thursday August 25 2016, @03:46PM
While moderation points are a major tool to make interesting replies more visible, the title adds a more personal touch to the filtering. I will only read a comment if the subject is a not piece of crap, and the first sentence is ok.
Keep them!
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 25 2016, @04:30PM
Even when it's just the continuation subject in a thread, it's useful, but when someone changes the subject, rather than starting a new thread, it can be quite useful...if, of course, the changed subject reflects a change in content. Forking a thread that way is often the only appropriate way to comment, when you're replying to part of a comment.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Thursday August 25 2016, @06:58PM
If you want to alter how people use subjects, there are user interface tweaks that can be done for this. One example would be to clear out the subject line when posts are written (to encourage people to put in their own subject). A checkbox (default unchecked) could be used to repopulate with the subject of the parent, or a random subject if no parent.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Thursday August 25 2016, @07:16PM
Sorry, I didn't have space for a [sarcasm] tag. Subjects (like titles) are useful, and I would keep them. The only change I could see being useful (for small screens) is to collapse the subject on thread display when it is identical to the parent post in the thread (that is, a response has the identical subject to the post being responded to).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Leebert on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:24PM
their comments in the subject. Makes it annoyingly confusing.
I'm one of the people who doesn't create an actual subject (one of my comments is an example link in this story). I use the "anachronism" subject not so much because I have a deep loathing of subjects in posts, but because I'm frankly not going to put the effort into filling out a subject line. Heck, probably half of my posts are only a sentence or two. The subject is the story, I find that self-evident.
I'm not going to bother filling it out. If other people derive utility from their presence, more power to you. Just don't be modding me "spam" just because you're mad I didn't fill out a subject.