The ideal thread implementation is in Flowdock (which not many people have heard of or use), but it's really the best of both worlds. Everything is a single stream of messages, and you can optionally group things as threads. There is a really nice blending of the two. Here's their implementation and you can see how well this works in practice. http://blog.flowdock.com/2017/08/31/the-1-customer-request-h...
Far far better than other abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.
> abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.
I'm not usually a defender of Slack but this is one of the things I _like_ about Slack threads. Typically in our rooms every discussion is a thread and if I'm not concerned with that particular discussion there's only ever one message and notification I need to dismiss. If I _am_ concerned with it I can opt in to reply notifications with two clicks.
I like how Slack hides threads. But I do have a few complaints.
I don't like that you can't come back later, select a bunch of messages or threads and say "Group into a thread" to clean up people not using threads.
Also I kind of hate when it's a week later and someone responds to a thread and you get pinged, but can't find where you got pinged from without clicking the dynamic group to see all thread activity.
Also, it really annoys me that threads open on the right with the text entry on the lower right when toast notifications on Windows pop up on the lower right, too. Great, now whenever someone replies I get a toast popup blocking me from seeing what I'm typing. Thanks, guys. Sure, that only happens on one monitor, but that's also the same monitor that I want my toast notifications and my Slack to be on because it's where I'm often looking.
Same here, if you don't hide the thread then what's the point? Some technical discussions in our team board last for hundred of messages, without threads it would be really hard to follow the channel, especially with multiple discussions going at the same time.
I'm sure this is an atypical use case, but I found the hidden threads really useful for creating spoiler threads about TV shows/movies/etc. All discussion about the topic can stay inside the thread, and folks who want to avoid spoilers can simply avoid clicking on the thread.
Indeed! So good to find someone else who had this experience. We went from Flowdock => Slack on a fully distributed team of ~20 engineers, total staff size of ~40. Flowdock threading was night-and-day so much better than Slack threading. It was such a stark difference, everyone noticed. What's so maddening about this is that I'll bring it up to anyone who will listen, and they'll think I'm just nostalgic, or a curmudgeon against all new things. But no, Flowdock simply did threads better. And you had to use both, for awhile, on real teams, to "feel" the difference. (Screenshots can't really convey it.) If you were on a scaled team using Flowdock before adopting Slack, it would have been totally obvious to you.
And yes, to the point of someone else on this HN thread, the closest thing to Flowdock threads on the market today in a semi-popular chat product is Zulip "Topics", as described here: https://zulip.com/help/about-streams-and-topics -- the difference is that Zulip forces threads to be labeled (similar to an email subject: line) whereas in Flowdock, all threads were anonymous, given a thread-id (permalink) automatically, and also automatically color-coded.
So I decided to do a search on Flowdock, turns out it is very old. And they have been down for two days [1] last year. Their last blog post are from 2018.
Flowdock was and still is a great product. Sadly, it was acquired way back in 2013 by Rally Technologies, which in turn was acquired by CA, which in turn by Broadcom. I think a majority of the original authors exit'ed at some point, and the product has seen rather little feature development ever since.
Lack of competent engineers in the product might also explain the extended downtimes last year. One of them apparently included a full-fledged database corruption where all conversations for a day or so were permanently lost.
I know at least one organization that is so deeply ingrained and accustomed to Flowdock that they haven't even considered migrating to Slack. I, too, still think that Flowdock is a superior product to Slack for the core chat feature. Adding simple video-conferencing would pretty much bring it up to speed with the modern day.
It does. Zulip calls what Discord and Slack refer to as "channels", "streams", and what Discord calls "threads", "topics".
Zulip's superior topic UX was why I went with it over Slack & Discord. Now Discord has feature-parity there and even more with 'private' topics/threads. I have to create a separate channel/stream if I want some topics to be private.
So now, since my users love Discord so much, I'm going to be fending off requests to move over to Discord, where the conversation data is locked in and cannot be self-hosted or exported.
Good for Discord, but I admit I'm not looking forward to said conversations.
I guess I would have to use Flowdock to understand -- those gifs were confusing and unclear to me. I'm not sure what I was looking at.
Personally I find slack threads perfectly usable and helpful for keeping things organized for the most part. What's the issue with them? I found them a revolutionary step forward in chat UX to be honest, something that had been missing for 20 years or more.
I'm not sure if this is appropriate, but getting conversation representation and message sorting right is the largest focus of my passion project, Ametha.
It would be amazing if I could have a 15 minute voice call with you to hear about your experiences with online communication & collaboration?
The offer is obviously open to anyone else here as well, but no pressure at all, and apologies if HN is not the right avenue for this.
Another really good implementation is Quill (quill.chat). It has a "room type" option where a room is either threaded or free for all. In a threaded room it's a little more message-board like, every top-level post has a topic and such, so it starts a thread. In a free-for-all room it's basically the same as Slack.
Being a heavy whatsapp user (Brazilian) I use Slack's forward function, inside the same conversation window (group or DM) as a "reference keeper" to what message I'm replying to, pretty much like whatsapp's "reply" feature.
I understand the "also send as direct message/to group" mimics this. This, for me, is a good thread implementation for a chat tool.
I actually feel that MS Teams is the best thread implementation (I haven't used Flowdock, but I have used Zulip). The app performance is a little slow which makes it feel slightly clunkier to use, but the UX for a normal Team channels makes everything be in a thread by default, and makes it completely intuitive.
I think you're underselling just how much slower and clunkier Teams is. It genuinely overshadows every supposed UX improvement for me, and it's nigh unusable on Linux / Firefox.
I hated when Slack brought them in, but slowly realised they're really useful when used appropriately & the responsibility is less on Slack itself & more on people using the feature appropriately; threads in 1:1 PMs are just utterly stupid though.
I’m not so sure I like people “rewriting” history. Edits past a certain time also break comment chains (which is why people call out their edit). Moving posts in and out of threads would make it very hard to find things, as well break timelines for troubleshooting.
The Rust developers largely use Zulip as an IRC replacement, and I find its UI to be excellent for my use cases: keeping up with advances to conversations that happened while I wasn't present, fully ignoring conversations that I'm not interested in, and focusing on individual conversations that are happening in parallel. An extremely good experience for such a thoroughly-distributed operation. The only downside is the slight friction for extremely minor conversation; it's good to have side channels just for idle, non-topical chitchat, which isn't a great fit for the Zulip UI.
Well, Discord is much more of an abomination due to its hostility towards user privacy and freedom. Slack has the excuse to appease bosses too. Discord takes data from children.
They granted create threads to everybody by default but granted manage threads to nobody by default.
So we had moderators who could delete channels, delete create and modify roles and role permissions, and delete messages as well as ban/kick users, but couldn't manage or delete threads.
"public threads" show up in the main channel list to everybody as a sub channel, and everybody had permission to create and name them what ever they wanted, but nobody could delete them until i logged in and gave it to my mods.
This happened to me, moderating a server, while our only admin was on vacation.
I was able to remove "create thread" permissions from the default role, effectively turning threads off. But first I had to add a new role to grant myself those permissions. I also had to ask people who had created threads to please delete them because I still can't.
This is obviously bad and I agree that they should have put a better default in place, but this bit isn't true: ""public threads" show up in the main channel list to everybody as a sub channel". In fact, you have to join a thread for it to show up in your channel list, so there's an opt-in interaction required. (or somebody could @mention you or manually add you to the thread, leaving a system message indicating they did so)
It's in the process of being rolled out. I own like 5 servers, 2 of them normal, non-community ones and none of them have gotten the feature yet while I'm in at least 4 servers which have already gotten the feature
Threads are great for helping you to actively ignore a discussion, but discord is a casual discussion app. Threads make it harder and weirder for people to chime in halfway through or to catch up on what people have been saying. Channels are used to group conversation topics that some people might want to ignore. I’d rather not have threads
> Threads make it harder and weirder for people to chime in halfway through or to catch up on what people have been saying
I’m of the completely opposite opinion.
If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream. With a thread, I can respond to who I want without interrupting anyone else. Without threads, you’re reading through all the messages and trying to figure out which are relevant.
Most of the Discords I’m in are game or mod related, and I’m often using their help/questions channels. There’s usually only one or two of these channels, so if multiple people need help at the same time you get scattered conversations and it’s confusing to follow, especially if you step away for a second.
Direct replies to the messages help but they still exist in that linear main chat stream, so there’s still a lot of clutter that everyone has to navigate through. With threads, you can have multiple questions asked simultaneously and each one has all their discussion in their respective threads, making it very obvious which messages are meant for which question and making it easier to navigate.
Forgot to mention: at my job, Slack threads have been super useful. Three or four people can discuss one topic in an open channel (so others can join in and we can search history) without spamming notifications against everyone else.
E.g. someone could put a message in #engineering about a bug. All the engineers get that notification so anyone who knows more details can chip in immediately. They then reply in a thread on the original bug message so they can discuss without everyone else getting bothered with irrelevant notifs AND without locking the conversation into a group DM where nobody else can chime in nor can we all easily search for it later if it’s relevant.
> If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream.
Yes, this is the essential nature of real-time chat. The channel already serves as the demarcation of topic.
What you're describing is a forum, a totally different modality.
> Direct replies to the messages help but they still exist in that linear main chat stream, so there’s still a lot of clutter that everyone has to navigate through.
This isn't clutter, it's literally the point of the tool.
> If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream.
This is also a feature that discourages a bunch of side conversations. If I've participated in conversations on 5 different topics that have moved on, it can sometimes be tiring to have those old threads reopened with more discussions. It's like having 3 text conversations while also being out to dinner with friends.
One way to keep that reputation is to not deploy features that enable more professional use cases. Perhaps they want to be more than a casual app?
I personally like threads, they are a very minor bump in app complexity that can significantly improve context reassembly - the primary issue with chat apps.
Is there really no better design for "aside" conversations than this? People lean on Slack threads too much, leading to a confused flow of conversation that makes it extremely difficult to piece together how the discussion was ended or resolved.
I’m always surprised by how practically every single opinion regarding personal communication is the opposite in hacker news to the mainstream opinion of my “real life” circles.
Use of social networks, slack, emojis, messaging apps, sync vs async communication…
Its not a criticism of any kind, mind you, it’s just very surprising to me.
I would be a bit slower on the hasty generalizations. I’m here on hacker news and I love using threads and am happy they’re coming to Discord there’s also multiple comments below this saying the same thing.
Nah, lots of us here love threads. Threads was one of the reasons our large private friends-only Slack server didn't move to Discord. This has reignited that conversation, as we like Discord more for certain things, and threads were one of the things holding us back.
The difference is we just aren't really saying anything.
I kind of feel similar. I already thought that the Replies feature was a better compromise for a chat room than Slack's threads (which I hated because so much conversation would just "disappear" from channels only to find out it was still happening in a thread from days or weeks before), but I'm also in several Discords that migrated from Slack and I know how many of my friends have been complaining that they missed Slack style threads for whatever reason.
I'm going to give this a shot a bit: an in depth reading of this blog post has given me some appreciation that Discord is trying to keep it better than Slack's. They have moderation mentioned front and center, so that feels good to me that they kept it strongly in mind. I also like that they will be visible in the channel list as "sub-channels" and that they will auto-archive with a time limit (defaulting to 24 hours to start). Those two things do try to address things I disliked about Slack's implementation, so I'm hopeful to give it a shot.
Maybe my remaining criticism here is I think I'd prefer the default time limit to be something smaller and related more directly to activity. Maybe something like "after an hour or maybe two hours of silence" to keep them to "active conversation sidebars" only. I also don't like that currently changing the time limit is a Level 2 Boost server feature if I wanted to explore options on smaller servers I control/moderate. On smaller servers your main option is just to turn them off entirely. (Though I sort of understand that it is a Level 2 Boost because from their perspective servers are going to want to increase the time limit as a perk. I wonder if they could make it free to decrease it, if it's not a "perk".)
> They have moderation mentioned front and center, so that feels good to me that they kept it strongly in mind.
What's annoying about this is it was sprung, default on, with no warning. I'm a mod (not the owner) of a server that got them, and we weren't given the permissions to disable them from @everyone, only the admin can do that at first. And he's not currently been on because of time zone differences. Which means it's just an easy open vector for someone to come in an raid and just cause chaos. They should've had it off by default, at least for a few days to let server owners experiment and play around with it.
Of all the chat apps I have used, Mattermost's implementation of threads/replies [0] has felt the most natural. That said, all implementations I've tried leave something to be desired.
I think we need to scrap the concept of a channel, and everything should be a thread instead.
You can categorize/tag threads (why not automatically based on groups of users) and they can show up as a feed similar on HN/SO/Reddit, but in a sidebar so you can easily swap between them.
If you're imagining how that would look, no need to look further than an email client. The advantage of it being threads with tags/categories is that it makes it easy to move one thread from one category/tag to another (for example moving the conversation from DEV to SRE) without loosing context/history.
Then there's no aside conversation, because everything is an aside.
I love having threads on Slack, but I absolutely hate that it always open in the right corner, instead of showing in the center. I always have to drag the border all the way to the left so it's not just a small column on the side
I agree. The Slack thread UX is not ideal, but the flow of conversation is so much better than it was pre-threads. I always end up closing the side bar and navigating to the thread in the "Threads" view. They should make it easier to maximize a thread.
I genuinely hadn't realised you could resize threads to be wider and found it really annoying how narrow they were. I don't think I'd noticed any visual cues you could resize them either (assuming the cues exist).
The only other type of thread design I know of is Reddit-style threads in a chat app. The negative of that is that the threads cannot be directly incorporated into chat itself after creation because they become things of their own, just like Reddit threads, but the positive is massive: threads are entities of their own and they can be infinitely nested and referred to indefinitely into the future.
An example of this design is Aether. (Disclosure: I work on this, aether.app) If you have issues with Slack-style threads or curious about alternative solutions to this issue, it might be worth checking out.
Zulip is the only decent implementations of threaded chat I could find, although it’s solution to “aside” conversations is that all conversations are “aside” (or none are), since you are using channels. It does wonders for discoverability though
I feel like threads are a solution to having an enormous continuous channel. Zulip solves this by not having an enormous continous channel. I think it makes sense to have topic-oriented discussion threads, and then have discussion within those threads all in the same continuous stream.
Forum threads/email convos for focused convos, stream-y chat otherwise. Mixing the two ends up being really messy IMO.
It does mean you gotta kinda move around, but I would kill for Slack to implement an "inbox-y" form of conversations, so I can actually keep track of open loops
Off topic but here's another feature that really shouldn't take 2 years to implement - only showing "In game" status on some servers, vs the current all-or-nothing approach.
Running two instances of Discord is not too complicated (at least on Linux) and might work well to separate your professional and gaming accounts. You only have to be careful of invite links, which will open in the first Discord you run.
Be aware that Discord treats this as a fraud indicator - the reason Ripcord does not support Discord multi-account is that it puts you at higher risk for a ban
It wouldn't be a problem, except that Discord takes over your fucking computer and doesn't let you sign into different accounts via private browser windows when you have the client running
Another problem with Discord is that its anti-spam measures are making it harder and harder to create an anonymous account
There's no point in having an anonymous Discord account if you have to use the same account for everything in your life. (Reddit and Facebook have the same problem as well)
I just wish I could just have a list of favorite channels. There already is a forum post on their website.
Servers have an obscene amount of channels, while IRC has a single channel per topic, and sometimes has one or a few more (ubuntu, for example).
I honestly have a hard time using discord because of that. Discussions are atomized. Some channel are just pointless and often silent. The notification system is stupid and you just mute everything because of it (the tray icon is always red while you have nothing to read, and you are not going to scroll all channels you're not really interested in).
Oh yeah, and displaying the user list is pretty pointless when there are more than 40 users. Just my opinion.
These look like a weird mix of Slack threads (temporary (though not enforced in Slack), written in sidebar) and Zulip threads/topics (named, available in the channel list), though... with downsides compared to both (for example, you can't forward messages to original channel like you could on Slack). Feels a bit awkward, but time will tell.
My main concern right now is with discoverability and moderation - it seems a bit difficult for moderators to see recent activity across all threads, unless I missed something.
As a Discord moderator (discord.gg/wilbur, 310k+) who's used Threads for a few months now while testing, there's a specific Threads button that lists all open threads - even private ones, although behind a toggle - and that works pretty okay. Most large servers only use Threads internally within staff teams, not in the wider general channels yet, though!
> there's a specific Threads button that lists all open threads
I can see there's a Threads button next to the search bar, but it appears to be scoped to the channel I'm in; I don't see a way to see threads across all channels.
Given they show up in the channel list as "sub-channels", discoverability and moderation should be straight forward and this blog post devotes an entire section to Moderation tools, so I'm cautiously optimistic on that part at least. (Especially in comparisons to Slack's Thread moderation which was rough in what little I tried to do of it.)
The catch is that they only show up in the channel list if you've "joined" the thread. They're otherwise just hidden behind the button up top (or you need to hit the backscroll).
This seems nice. I'm not a huge Discord user but one thing that always bugs me when I'm occasionally using it is when there's 2 topics of conversation going on at once. It especially happens a lot in help threads, where 2 people are needing help at the same time and people have to keep replying to the previous message in that conversation.
Though at the same time, it seems a bit weird that it's almost like a sub-channel? Does that mean in this scenario you'd have a whole list of threads down the side underneath the channel for every question?
I see people complaining about Slack threads but I personally find them perfect for what it needs to do. Creating a short thread from a message doesn't seem as big of a deal as what this looks to be doing.
Readit News
Far far better than other abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.
I'm not usually a defender of Slack but this is one of the things I _like_ about Slack threads. Typically in our rooms every discussion is a thread and if I'm not concerned with that particular discussion there's only ever one message and notification I need to dismiss. If I _am_ concerned with it I can opt in to reply notifications with two clicks.
I don't like that you can't come back later, select a bunch of messages or threads and say "Group into a thread" to clean up people not using threads.
Also I kind of hate when it's a week later and someone responds to a thread and you get pinged, but can't find where you got pinged from without clicking the dynamic group to see all thread activity.
Also, it really annoys me that threads open on the right with the text entry on the lower right when toast notifications on Windows pop up on the lower right, too. Great, now whenever someone replies I get a toast popup blocking me from seeing what I'm typing. Thanks, guys. Sure, that only happens on one monitor, but that's also the same monitor that I want my toast notifications and my Slack to be on because it's where I'm often looking.
Tweeted about this here:
https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/1263317861537402885
Nice to meet a fellow traveller!
And yes, to the point of someone else on this HN thread, the closest thing to Flowdock threads on the market today in a semi-popular chat product is Zulip "Topics", as described here: https://zulip.com/help/about-streams-and-topics -- the difference is that Zulip forces threads to be labeled (similar to an email subject: line) whereas in Flowdock, all threads were anonymous, given a thread-id (permalink) automatically, and also automatically color-coded.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945633
Lack of competent engineers in the product might also explain the extended downtimes last year. One of them apparently included a full-fledged database corruption where all conversations for a day or so were permanently lost.
I know at least one organization that is so deeply ingrained and accustomed to Flowdock that they haven't even considered migrating to Slack. I, too, still think that Flowdock is a superior product to Slack for the core chat feature. Adding simple video-conferencing would pretty much bring it up to speed with the modern day.
Zulip's superior topic UX was why I went with it over Slack & Discord. Now Discord has feature-parity there and even more with 'private' topics/threads. I have to create a separate channel/stream if I want some topics to be private.
So now, since my users love Discord so much, I'm going to be fending off requests to move over to Discord, where the conversation data is locked in and cannot be self-hosted or exported.
Good for Discord, but I admit I'm not looking forward to said conversations.
Personally I find slack threads perfectly usable and helpful for keeping things organized for the most part. What's the issue with them? I found them a revolutionary step forward in chat UX to be honest, something that had been missing for 20 years or more.
I'm not sure if this is appropriate, but getting conversation representation and message sorting right is the largest focus of my passion project, Ametha.
It would be amazing if I could have a 15 minute voice call with you to hear about your experiences with online communication & collaboration?
The offer is obviously open to anyone else here as well, but no pressure at all, and apologies if HN is not the right avenue for this.
Edit: Feel free to use the email in my profile
I understand the "also send as direct message/to group" mimics this. This, for me, is a good thread implementation for a chat tool.
But the core design with threads is a killer feature and prevents migration to anything else.
Dead Comment
They granted create threads to everybody by default but granted manage threads to nobody by default.
So we had moderators who could delete channels, delete create and modify roles and role permissions, and delete messages as well as ban/kick users, but couldn't manage or delete threads.
"public threads" show up in the main channel list to everybody as a sub channel, and everybody had permission to create and name them what ever they wanted, but nobody could delete them until i logged in and gave it to my mods.
Realllllllllly well done roll out discord.
I was able to remove "create thread" permissions from the default role, effectively turning threads off. But first I had to add a new role to grant myself those permissions. I also had to ask people who had created threads to please delete them because I still can't.
Assuming you're an Administrator, it's covered by that.
I’m of the completely opposite opinion.
If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream. With a thread, I can respond to who I want without interrupting anyone else. Without threads, you’re reading through all the messages and trying to figure out which are relevant.
Most of the Discords I’m in are game or mod related, and I’m often using their help/questions channels. There’s usually only one or two of these channels, so if multiple people need help at the same time you get scattered conversations and it’s confusing to follow, especially if you step away for a second.
Direct replies to the messages help but they still exist in that linear main chat stream, so there’s still a lot of clutter that everyone has to navigate through. With threads, you can have multiple questions asked simultaneously and each one has all their discussion in their respective threads, making it very obvious which messages are meant for which question and making it easier to navigate.
E.g. someone could put a message in #engineering about a bug. All the engineers get that notification so anyone who knows more details can chip in immediately. They then reply in a thread on the original bug message so they can discuss without everyone else getting bothered with irrelevant notifs AND without locking the conversation into a group DM where nobody else can chime in nor can we all easily search for it later if it’s relevant.
Yes, this is the essential nature of real-time chat. The channel already serves as the demarcation of topic.
What you're describing is a forum, a totally different modality.
> Direct replies to the messages help but they still exist in that linear main chat stream, so there’s still a lot of clutter that everyone has to navigate through.
This isn't clutter, it's literally the point of the tool.
This is also a feature that discourages a bunch of side conversations. If I've participated in conversations on 5 different topics that have moved on, it can sometimes be tiring to have those old threads reopened with more discussions. It's like having 3 text conversations while also being out to dinner with friends.
One way to keep that reputation is to not deploy features that enable more professional use cases. Perhaps they want to be more than a casual app?
I personally like threads, they are a very minor bump in app complexity that can significantly improve context reassembly - the primary issue with chat apps.
They do, hence their recent rebranding that resulted in less of a "for gamers" image :)
Use of social networks, slack, emojis, messaging apps, sync vs async communication…
Its not a criticism of any kind, mind you, it’s just very surprising to me.
The difference is we just aren't really saying anything.
HN always presents a lot of reactionary positions to anything.
I'm going to give this a shot a bit: an in depth reading of this blog post has given me some appreciation that Discord is trying to keep it better than Slack's. They have moderation mentioned front and center, so that feels good to me that they kept it strongly in mind. I also like that they will be visible in the channel list as "sub-channels" and that they will auto-archive with a time limit (defaulting to 24 hours to start). Those two things do try to address things I disliked about Slack's implementation, so I'm hopeful to give it a shot.
Maybe my remaining criticism here is I think I'd prefer the default time limit to be something smaller and related more directly to activity. Maybe something like "after an hour or maybe two hours of silence" to keep them to "active conversation sidebars" only. I also don't like that currently changing the time limit is a Level 2 Boost server feature if I wanted to explore options on smaller servers I control/moderate. On smaller servers your main option is just to turn them off entirely. (Though I sort of understand that it is a Level 2 Boost because from their perspective servers are going to want to increase the time limit as a perk. I wonder if they could make it free to decrease it, if it's not a "perk".)
What's annoying about this is it was sprung, default on, with no warning. I'm a mod (not the owner) of a server that got them, and we weren't given the permissions to disable them from @everyone, only the admin can do that at first. And he's not currently been on because of time zone differences. Which means it's just an easy open vector for someone to come in an raid and just cause chaos. They should've had it off by default, at least for a few days to let server owners experiment and play around with it.
[0]: https://docs.mattermost.com/messaging/organizing-conversatio...
You can categorize/tag threads (why not automatically based on groups of users) and they can show up as a feed similar on HN/SO/Reddit, but in a sidebar so you can easily swap between them.
If you're imagining how that would look, no need to look further than an email client. The advantage of it being threads with tags/categories is that it makes it easy to move one thread from one category/tag to another (for example moving the conversation from DEV to SRE) without loosing context/history.
Then there's no aside conversation, because everything is an aside.
An example of this design is Aether. (Disclosure: I work on this, aether.app) If you have issues with Slack-style threads or curious about alternative solutions to this issue, it might be worth checking out.
Forum threads/email convos for focused convos, stream-y chat otherwise. Mixing the two ends up being really messy IMO.
It does mean you gotta kinda move around, but I would kill for Slack to implement an "inbox-y" form of conversations, so I can actually keep track of open loops
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600483...
Another problem with Discord is that its anti-spam measures are making it harder and harder to create an anonymous account
There's no point in having an anonymous Discord account if you have to use the same account for everything in your life. (Reddit and Facebook have the same problem as well)
Servers have an obscene amount of channels, while IRC has a single channel per topic, and sometimes has one or a few more (ubuntu, for example).
I honestly have a hard time using discord because of that. Discussions are atomized. Some channel are just pointless and often silent. The notification system is stupid and you just mute everything because of it (the tray icon is always red while you have nothing to read, and you are not going to scroll all channels you're not really interested in).
Oh yeah, and displaying the user list is pretty pointless when there are more than 40 users. Just my opinion.
I just keep a very small amount of servers.
My main concern right now is with discoverability and moderation - it seems a bit difficult for moderators to see recent activity across all threads, unless I missed something.
Other than that, I'm cautiously neutral.
I can see there's a Threads button next to the search bar, but it appears to be scoped to the channel I'm in; I don't see a way to see threads across all channels.
Though at the same time, it seems a bit weird that it's almost like a sub-channel? Does that mean in this scenario you'd have a whole list of threads down the side underneath the channel for every question?
I see people complaining about Slack threads but I personally find them perfect for what it needs to do. Creating a short thread from a message doesn't seem as big of a deal as what this looks to be doing.
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