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The "threaded" part is key here. Slack threads are useless compared to Zulip. In Zulip you can create threads on the fly from existing messages, so if discussio

The "threaded" part is key here. Slack threads are useless compared to Zulip. In Zulip you can create threads on the fly from existing messages, so if discussion starts diverging you can turn it into a new thread. It's just a fundamentally superior model.

mushufasa 5y ago
Zulip is one of the very few software tools that I really find a joy to use, because they make it easy to work within the correct patterns. Seriously, it's hard to express this experience until you've tried it. If you look at their feature lists, you can't appreciate the craft and love and thought put into Zulip that makes it stand out from other chat systems. And you may live in the chat systems with your distributed teams all day.
- aesyondu 5y ago
  > Zulip is one of the very few software tools that I really find a joy to use I'd like to know what the others are.
  - mushufasa 5y ago
    like that magical moment when you understand unix pipes and how to powerfully tie things together with a shell one-liner except without requiring years to master
- StavrosK 5y ago
  My current company uses Slack and I groan every time I have to use it. I miss Zulip greatly.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
karlicoss 5y ago
Yep! I think the author highlights it well > I received over 20,000 messages in chat.zulip.org during my paternity leave. I really enjoyed reading everything and replying to the hundreds of topics where I had something to contribute or someone to thank. Systematically reading months of history would have been impossible with any other tool!
- stefan_ 5y ago
  Wait what? We are supposed to do that? My reaction after months long paternity leave to something like Slack messages would be "mark all read".
  - karlicoss 5y ago
    Fair enough, and depends on your FOMO -- but with Zulip's topics/threads you'd be the one who makes this call. E.g. you probably want to skip some banter or some operational stuff, but still catch up with the topics you want to catch up -- and at your own pace.
  - tabbott 5y ago
    (Post author here) I don't think most people need to read everything they receive, but in my role as the project leader of a large open source community, essentially every conversation in chat.zulip.org is potentially relevant for me, so skimming every conversation is useful. The critical thing here, both in my daily work and coming back from time away, is that Zulip makes skimming really cheap (`n` to jump to next topic, then read a moment and then hit `End` if it seems likely that the thread is resolved to check the conclusion, and then repeat). So a 150-message thread debugging something takes like 30 seconds -- read the first post (maybe a bug report), note who was helping investigate, jump to send and see that the topic ends with a PR link or other resolution. At the same time, Zulip's organization means I could find the dozen of threads that might be a short thread presenting a question or problem that I'm our main expert on. In these cases, I can read the thread carefully, and send a reply resurrecting the thread (2 months later) with answer that was missing, some added context/background, or a link to a PR I made to put the answer in our documentation (my preferred solution to unanswered questions). This has the effect of unblocking a bunch of useful work that had been waiting for me to return, and also giving me good context on everything I missed. It's also pretty fun to see all the great that folks did while I was away :)
    - tabbott 5y ago
      Backing up from the special case of a paternity leave, what's important here is that with Zulip, catching up on conversations you missed is an efficient use of your time, which it really isn't for other team chat tools. Essentially everyone has miniature versions of the catch-up problem: * Fulltime employees coming back from a normal 1-2 week vacation. * Anyone working closely with collaborators in other time zones (I wake up every morning to a couple hundred new messages in chat.zulip.org sent by our international community members). * Any leader who spends a lot of time in meetings and wants to focus on the meeting and then batch-process communications afterwards. * Any engineer who wants to be able to spend a whole or half day focusing on a really difficult problem and catch up on conversations afterwards. * Anyone who's a part-time participant in an open community, whether they just check it once a day, one a week, or once a month. A user in this situation really wants to skim everything that happened and find what's interesting to them, not read the last few hours' traffic, which is what the Slack/Discord/Teams model forces you to do. The same technique core works for all of these cases: pick your favorite streams and read them with `n` as I described above, then perhaps browse the list of topics in several more and click into just the topics that interest you and then mark the rest (if any) as read. All IRC-inspired chat tools are a really rough experience for part-time participants -- they just don't have a way to let you prioritize reading interesting conversations. We discuss this issue at length and its consequences for inclusivity of the communities that use them in https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ https://zulip.com/for/open-source/. (It's framed around inclusivity in open source, but the Slack channel model also can exclude leaders who spend most of their time in meetings) (As a sidenote, being able to do this is why Zulip pushes users to have every conversation in a topic, rather than "threading" being a side feature used for 10% messages like some other tools do.)
Quiark 5y ago
Interesting. Threads in MS Teams utterly don't get used, they require significant self discipline to use properly (and yet they get more love from the devs than chat, somebody at MS is misguided in how the thing actually gets used).
- Something1234 5y ago
  All it takes is disabling the bottom new thread creation box and replacing it with a button. That's what work did and it's so easily enforced on the creation of new threads.
  - gregmac 5y ago
    Is this not just something MS Teams did? [1] You seem to be implying it's an optional setting or customization. I'm not an MS Teams admin, just a user on one instance of Teams, and was happy when the button appeared. It stopped the broken conversations, but it didn't make anyone use MS Teams any more than necessary. (Our group has been using Slack for longer than Teams has been around, and since Teams is still inferior in nearly every way we haven't switched; due to the near silence from every other org in the company, they're probably doing the same). [1] https://stitchdx.com/blog/microsoft-teams-new-conversation-button/ https://stitchdx.com/blog/microsoft-teams-new-conversation-b...
    - Something1234 5y ago
      Interesting. I was assuming it was an admin who did it at my place of work. We moved to teams from zooms ephemeral chats, and I have to say it's nicer in teams with all of the integrations and file storage.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I've had the opposite experience with Teams threads. I'm at a big company where about half the posts are made by non-technical people, and yet the threads seem to get used pretty well. For all the things I hate about Teams, they seem to have hit a sweet spot in that bit of UI where it's hard (but not impossible) to accidentally add to an existing thread with a new topic, or accidentally make a new thread when you were trying to reply to a post, and because of that things stay pretty organized.

mushufasa 5y ago

Zulip is one of the very few software tools that I really find a joy to use, because they make it easy to work within the correct patterns. Seriously, it's hard to express this experience until you've tried it. If you look at their feature lists, you can't appreciate the craft and love and thought put into Zulip that makes it stand out from other chat systems. And you may live in the chat systems with your distributed teams all day.

aesyondu 5y ago
> Zulip is one of the very few software tools that I really find a joy to use I'd like to know what the others are.
- mushufasa 5y ago
  like that magical moment when you understand unix pipes and how to powerfully tie things together with a shell one-liner except without requiring years to master
StavrosK 5y ago
My current company uses Slack and I groan every time I have to use it. I miss Zulip greatly.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

karlicoss 5y ago

Yep! I think the author highlights it well > I received over 20,000 messages in chat.zulip.org during my paternity leave. I really enjoyed reading everything and replying to the hundreds of topics where I had something to contribute or someone to thank. Systematically reading months of history would have been impossible with any other tool!

stefan_ 5y ago
Wait what? We are supposed to do that? My reaction after months long paternity leave to something like Slack messages would be "mark all read".
- karlicoss 5y ago
  Fair enough, and depends on your FOMO -- but with Zulip's topics/threads you'd be the one who makes this call. E.g. you probably want to skip some banter or some operational stuff, but still catch up with the topics you want to catch up -- and at your own pace.
- tabbott 5y ago
  (Post author here) I don't think most people need to read everything they receive, but in my role as the project leader of a large open source community, essentially every conversation in chat.zulip.org is potentially relevant for me, so skimming every conversation is useful. The critical thing here, both in my daily work and coming back from time away, is that Zulip makes skimming really cheap (`n` to jump to next topic, then read a moment and then hit `End` if it seems likely that the thread is resolved to check the conclusion, and then repeat). So a 150-message thread debugging something takes like 30 seconds -- read the first post (maybe a bug report), note who was helping investigate, jump to send and see that the topic ends with a PR link or other resolution. At the same time, Zulip's organization means I could find the dozen of threads that might be a short thread presenting a question or problem that I'm our main expert on. In these cases, I can read the thread carefully, and send a reply resurrecting the thread (2 months later) with answer that was missing, some added context/background, or a link to a PR I made to put the answer in our documentation (my preferred solution to unanswered questions). This has the effect of unblocking a bunch of useful work that had been waiting for me to return, and also giving me good context on everything I missed. It's also pretty fun to see all the great that folks did while I was away :)
  - tabbott 5y ago
    Backing up from the special case of a paternity leave, what's important here is that with Zulip, catching up on conversations you missed is an efficient use of your time, which it really isn't for other team chat tools. Essentially everyone has miniature versions of the catch-up problem: * Fulltime employees coming back from a normal 1-2 week vacation. * Anyone working closely with collaborators in other time zones (I wake up every morning to a couple hundred new messages in chat.zulip.org sent by our international community members). * Any leader who spends a lot of time in meetings and wants to focus on the meeting and then batch-process communications afterwards. * Any engineer who wants to be able to spend a whole or half day focusing on a really difficult problem and catch up on conversations afterwards. * Anyone who's a part-time participant in an open community, whether they just check it once a day, one a week, or once a month. A user in this situation really wants to skim everything that happened and find what's interesting to them, not read the last few hours' traffic, which is what the Slack/Discord/Teams model forces you to do. The same technique core works for all of these cases: pick your favorite streams and read them with `n` as I described above, then perhaps browse the list of topics in several more and click into just the topics that interest you and then mark the rest (if any) as read. All IRC-inspired chat tools are a really rough experience for part-time participants -- they just don't have a way to let you prioritize reading interesting conversations. We discuss this issue at length and its consequences for inclusivity of the communities that use them in https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ https://zulip.com/for/open-source/. (It's framed around inclusivity in open source, but the Slack channel model also can exclude leaders who spend most of their time in meetings) (As a sidenote, being able to do this is why Zulip pushes users to have every conversation in a topic, rather than "threading" being a side feature used for 10% messages like some other tools do.)

Quiark 5y ago

Interesting. Threads in MS Teams utterly don't get used, they require significant self discipline to use properly (and yet they get more love from the devs than chat, somebody at MS is misguided in how the thing actually gets used).

Something1234 5y ago
All it takes is disabling the bottom new thread creation box and replacing it with a button. That's what work did and it's so easily enforced on the creation of new threads.
- gregmac 5y ago
  Is this not just something MS Teams did? [1] You seem to be implying it's an optional setting or customization. I'm not an MS Teams admin, just a user on one instance of Teams, and was happy when the button appeared. It stopped the broken conversations, but it didn't make anyone use MS Teams any more than necessary. (Our group has been using Slack for longer than Teams has been around, and since Teams is still inferior in nearly every way we haven't switched; due to the near silence from every other org in the company, they're probably doing the same). [1] https://stitchdx.com/blog/microsoft-teams-new-conversation-button/ https://stitchdx.com/blog/microsoft-teams-new-conversation-b...
  - Something1234 5y ago
    Interesting. I was assuming it was an admin who did it at my place of work. We moved to teams from zooms ephemeral chats, and I have to say it's nicer in teams with all of the integrations and file storage.
happytoexplain 5y ago
I've had the opposite experience with Teams threads. I'm at a big company where about half the posts are made by non-technical people, and yet the threads seem to get used pretty well. For all the things I hate about Teams, they seem to have hit a sweet spot in that bit of UI where it's hard (but not impossible) to accidentally add to an existing thread with a new topic, or accidentally make a new thread when you were trying to reply to a post, and because of that things stay pretty organized.