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A lot of people, including me, dislike threading in Slack. It breaks the algorithm for reading new messages. I use it when teammates do, and acknowledge it's us
by benatkin 6y ago
A lot of people, including me, dislike threading in Slack. It breaks the algorithm for reading new messages. I use it when teammates do, and acknowledge it's useful sometimes, but I would prefer not to have that feature.
Discord also does not have threads. I've heard some complaints about it, but not many.
Threads in Zulip seem to change it into a different kind of app. I don't see how the Slack workspaces that I've used heavily would work with it. There are about 15 channels in my sidebar. Making them nested would turn it into 75, assuming 5 threads per channel. Perhaps there wouldn't need to be as many top-level channels with Zulip threads, but it makes it into a whole different paradigm. They are also missing Slack-style threads. I don't think it would be good to adopt it.
- Xylakant 6y agoZulip threads (topics) are fundamentally different from slack threads. TL;DR Slack threads are an after-thought add-on, Zulips topics are a first-class citizen. Slacks threads can branch of at any point from any message in a channel - if you miss the start of the thread message, it disappears unless someone cross-posts to the channel or mentions you. This is by far the biggest problem I have with slack threads. Zulip organizes into streams and topics, streams being roughly equivalent to channels and topics similar to threads. However, unlike slack, every message must live in a topic. Topics that have seen a message lately bubble to the top, topics that don't see activity fall to the bottom. You can still see the full stream in chronological order, but messages are grouped by and visibly marked with the topic they belong to. This makes it much easier to both follow a stream and still mentally follow multiple conversations in the same stream.
- ttsda 6y agoI think threads, used sparingly, are nice. They're good to have semi-private messages, so you can keep the more irrelevant conversation that would normally go to PM public and searchable, while not spamming the channel. They're also good for support channels, to have a thread per support message.
- eXpl0it3r 6y agoI like threads a lot in the way we use it. With 60+ people in one channel, being able to ask a question and get answers in the thread, while not spamming the channel with replies and potentially interweaving multiple question & answer "threads" is really useful.
- climb_stealth 6y agoThreads in Slack are useful but the implementation is pretty bad. For example you don't see new responses in a visible thread until you click the button for more messages. It makes them really frustrating to use. Slack does a lot of things really well which makes the pain of using threads even worse.
- endgame 6y agoAnd for some boneheaded reason, you can't /collapse in threads, so if you have colleagues who like both threads and gifs, you're stuck.
- OJFord 6y agoI also wish there wasn't 'sharing', or at least not to the same channel, so that there's one clear way for the 'continue earlier topic' use case. Having said that, there's also 'reply to thread and also share to channel', making it even worse. I think that one's the closest Slack has to fixing threading's problems though - if you're aware of it being a potential issue, you can at least highlight it. It'd be good if there were an 'active thread(s)' thing that appeared on the right side or something (at the bottom of what is the the thread panel when one's open, I'm imagining though. Easy to ignore, but when you're checking if there's new messages in your main channel you'd also see if there were new thread activity.
- yawgmoth 6y agoDiscord has a feature (recently added?) in which you can reply to something -- it gets miniquoted above your reply. It does a good job of 'flattening out the tree'.
- boogies 6y agoElement appears to have the same thing right now
- ptman 6y agoreplies have been a thing for quite a while in matrix
- pbronez 6y agoI find this to be a critical feature in long-running threads. I use it extensively in WhatsApp
- Kinrany 6y agoTelegram also shows all the replies to a given message as a separate chat, effectively turning messages into Reddit-like trees. It's half-baked, but it seems like a great alternative to regular presentation: linear history, but filterable.
- cpuguy83 6y agoThreading is the one thing I actually kinda like in Teams.
- the_duke 6y ago> I don't see how the Slack workspaces that I've used heavily would work with it. Quite simply: you don't know what you are missing. I was sceptical at first as well, but having the ability to branch off into separate sub-topics while still maintaining easy visibility is extremely nice for organizing conversations and catching up on things you missed in busy channels. The nice thing is: you can just use flat channels where appropriate, or just ignore the nested topics and read a channel as a regular continuous stream. It's incredibly conducive to long-form discussions and organizing information, while still retaining the casualness of a chat when required.
- benatkin 6y agoWell I'll probably never know unless I join a team of 10+ that happens to use Zulip. I played with it on my own for about an hour.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoMy company uses Google Chat, which isn't great but has threads. It would be unusable without that feature, some rooms have thousands of members.