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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: 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.