Slack #threadfail
medium.com
medium.com
New stuff appearing at the top of "All Threads": That intrinsically made sense to me, such that I had to try to figure out how to explain why. Here's what I've come up with:
* "All Threads" is not a channel. A channel is a sequence, in which Slack decided that the newest item appears on the bottom (in the style of IRC, etc.). The "All Threads" view, however, is a different structure. Maybe some sort of stack? Regardless, it's a different thing from a channel, and so deserves to be presented different.
* Since "All Threads" is placed above the channel list, when I click on it my eyes are already looking near the top of the window. Having the latest thread on top means my eyes don't have to reposition as much to see what's just come in.
Having the "Also send to channel" box turned off by default, combined with not "re-surfacing" the thread when new posts appear, is exactly what I'd expect. Assuming the thread stays on-topic, once I've decided that I don't want to participate, then I don't want to see it any more. Re-surfacing an item which I've already dismissed would just cause aggravation (like those annoying Windows 10 upgrade pop-up messages you could never fully dismiss). If I find that I want to check in on a thread, I'll either scroll up for it, or I'll search for it.
I agree about the lack of extra functionality in threads (like posting images and code), but I expect that's something which Slack can work on. In no way would I assume that Slack's implementation of threads is complete!
I'm kindof curious: Does the Fast Company article you reference provide hard dates, other than those from their blog and from Twitter? All the hard dates I've seen show 2015 as the earliest. Personally, I think that in this case, moving carefully is a good thing: Given the important role that Slack plays in many places, I imagine that breaking something (for instance, by moving too quickly) would create alot of resentment and cause people to move to other platforms. It's a conundrum that less-popular platforms don't have to face.
To Slack, I say Congratulations on their release, and I look forward to the iterations!
As for hard dates I don't know of any, but the article suggests "2 years" and I've seen StackOverflow posts from 2014 asking about threading so I'm sure it was at least on Slack's radar for that long.
The point of all of this however is that a) 2 years is far too long for an MVP rollout (if that's what this is) and that b) they simply added some lipstick onto existing substandard features.
Our personal preferences re: UX etc aren't even really all that relevant as we'll obviously never agree on that, but we can certainly agree that spending 2 years delivering a limited-use MVP for a giant company like Slack with almost unlimited manpower is pretty miserable.