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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, 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.