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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: 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.