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That’s an unnecessarily hostile comment. I want to disable threads for myself so I don’t miss important messages. What’s your use case for disabling vowels? And

That’s an unnecessarily hostile comment. I want to disable threads for myself so I don’t miss important messages. What’s your use case for disabling vowels? And where’s your list of people genuinely asking for disabling vowels for years?

raldi 7y ago
I'm sorry; I've just seen this attitude so many times in my career of, "Why not just create an option for this thing that would completely upend the way the product works?", which doubles the number of possible things you then need to test for, complicates the product, slows down development, adds technical debt, bloats the software, and clutters up the options screen. I'm on a couple slacks, some where local culture is firmly built on threading, and some where it's not, and the former is at least 10x more productive and enjoyable. If other members of the community had the option to view things threadlessly, they would start replying to threads in the main channel, and ruin the experience for everyone else. You might say this wouldn't happen much, but think about how hard it is just to get your coworkers to stop using @here frivolously.
- sinatra 7y ago
  Thank you for turning the conversation more polite. I agree with you about options having a cost. However, if so many of your users are complaining about something, and if the complaint is about something as important as “losing messages,” then something should be done about it. It’s no longer enough to say that “but it works for some people” or to say that “options add complexity.” Our entire core team has discussed this. Nobody wants threads. They all lose messages due to this. But sometimes we accidentally respond to messages that start a thread. So, we want this option to be removed for the entire organization. But we can’t. It’s an option that’ll have cost, yes. But, it’ll be much simpler than many other complicated (and low value) things Slack has worked on in past two years. Those other things are also adding complexity, slowing down dev, increasing things to test, etc. And, again, this option solves a serious and fundamental problem of losing messages. So, it’s worth the cost for many of their users.
  - raldi 7y ago
    If your team embraces threading, you'll soon see it's far superior re: not missing messages. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758075 for some details on this; the gist is, when everyone threads, it’s easy to catch up when you’ve been away, and you automatically get notified when someone follows up on a topic you’ve been participating in. Are you familiar with the way you can cc: the channel on a thread comment when you’re concerned people might miss it?
  - rockostrich 7y ago
    If your entire core team does not want threads, then police your company's slack to make sure people aren't using threads. The engineering org at my company decided that threads should be used as much as possible and when people don't reply to a previous message using a thread, they get told to use a thread next time. After months of doing this, noisy messages that are just replies to other messages have decreased significantly. Another alternative is having people always mark the checkbox that says "Also send to #channel". Vocal minorities shouldn't drive product decisions.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- drb91 7y ago
  What does a good experience with slack look like? Just not getting annoyed by anything?
  - raldi 7y ago
    I can be away for a few days, catch up quickly, and add a comment to a conversation that ended long ago and know that the participants will actually see it. All thanks to threads.
    - drb91 7y ago
      Catching up quickly is not something I associate with slack—mostly missing things, actually. This is obviously a hard problem to solve without just making it back into email. Muting apps that spam notifications for someone else’s benefit would be a great start. Not allowing bots to spam new threads at you and cleaning up old threads automatically would also be great—having a ton of old threads brings the client to its knees on my dual core laptop.
      - raldi 7y ago
        How thready is your slack's culture?
        drb91 7y ago
        Somewhere in between real-time chat and email. I'm not sure how threads would help keep track of things though—they're unnamed and you have to scroll through them at an absolute glacial speed, and there's no way to bulk unfollow, so with about six hours of normal use a conversation is lost to the sands of time forever. Slack just sucks for anything you need to find again, IMHO, it should be treated like it's ephemeral. The logs are worth keeping as leverage against employees of course.

raldi 7y ago

I'm sorry; I've just seen this attitude so many times in my career of, "Why not just create an option for this thing that would completely upend the way the product works?", which doubles the number of possible things you then need to test for, complicates the product, slows down development, adds technical debt, bloats the software, and clutters up the options screen. I'm on a couple slacks, some where local culture is firmly built on threading, and some where it's not, and the former is at least 10x more productive and enjoyable. If other members of the community had the option to view things threadlessly, they would start replying to threads in the main channel, and ruin the experience for everyone else. You might say this wouldn't happen much, but think about how hard it is just to get your coworkers to stop using @here frivolously.

sinatra 7y ago
Thank you for turning the conversation more polite. I agree with you about options having a cost. However, if so many of your users are complaining about something, and if the complaint is about something as important as “losing messages,” then something should be done about it. It’s no longer enough to say that “but it works for some people” or to say that “options add complexity.” Our entire core team has discussed this. Nobody wants threads. They all lose messages due to this. But sometimes we accidentally respond to messages that start a thread. So, we want this option to be removed for the entire organization. But we can’t. It’s an option that’ll have cost, yes. But, it’ll be much simpler than many other complicated (and low value) things Slack has worked on in past two years. Those other things are also adding complexity, slowing down dev, increasing things to test, etc. And, again, this option solves a serious and fundamental problem of losing messages. So, it’s worth the cost for many of their users.
- raldi 7y ago
  If your team embraces threading, you'll soon see it's far superior re: not missing messages. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19758075 for some details on this; the gist is, when everyone threads, it’s easy to catch up when you’ve been away, and you automatically get notified when someone follows up on a topic you’ve been participating in. Are you familiar with the way you can cc: the channel on a thread comment when you’re concerned people might miss it?
- rockostrich 7y ago
  If your entire core team does not want threads, then police your company's slack to make sure people aren't using threads. The engineering org at my company decided that threads should be used as much as possible and when people don't reply to a previous message using a thread, they get told to use a thread next time. After months of doing this, noisy messages that are just replies to other messages have decreased significantly. Another alternative is having people always mark the checkbox that says "Also send to #channel". Vocal minorities shouldn't drive product decisions.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
drb91 7y ago
What does a good experience with slack look like? Just not getting annoyed by anything?
- raldi 7y ago
  I can be away for a few days, catch up quickly, and add a comment to a conversation that ended long ago and know that the participants will actually see it. All thanks to threads.
  - drb91 7y ago
    Catching up quickly is not something I associate with slack—mostly missing things, actually. This is obviously a hard problem to solve without just making it back into email. Muting apps that spam notifications for someone else’s benefit would be a great start. Not allowing bots to spam new threads at you and cleaning up old threads automatically would also be great—having a ton of old threads brings the client to its knees on my dual core laptop.
    - raldi 7y ago
      How thready is your slack's culture?
      - drb91 7y ago
        Somewhere in between real-time chat and email. I'm not sure how threads would help keep track of things though—they're unnamed and you have to scroll through them at an absolute glacial speed, and there's no way to bulk unfollow, so with about six hours of normal use a conversation is lost to the sands of time forever. Slack just sucks for anything you need to find again, IMHO, it should be treated like it's ephemeral. The logs are worth keeping as leverage against employees of course.