In June 2018, we're making changes to the native social capabilities in SharePoint Online

Oh wow. Newsfeed is such an old Tech that I at first was "haven't it been removed already?" 

What I am looking for is to take it even further and replace SharePoint comment with Yammer comment though. The news feature is awesome in Sites and should remain there. We used the news to replace information e-mails with success. The comment section should be in Yammer where if the site has a Yammer feed - any new conversation should be added as a new thread to the Group, and further replies will be in that thread. 

If there isn't a Group attached to it, we should be able to configure a Group for it. Could be "intrantet comments" or "All Company" in Yammer. 

The way of working to move from e-mail to Enterprise social integrated with document management and clear Communications isn't quite there yet, since we want to replace "send e-mail" and "reply e-mail" with "Create news" and discuss….. if someone comes there. Once you have read a piece of news you don't naturally come back to it but you are comming back to the conversation in Yammer (or Facebook, or Twitter or.. or..) which you can turn on notifications for. Or off, if you are done with it.