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Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

Tangent about threads and Slack culture.

I have noticed that there are people who either purposefully, or unconsciously, do not use threads. They litter the stream by making sentences instead of paragraphs. What I don't understand is how could Slack not see this as an issue?

From my individual's perspective, I don't get the idea of chats as a one liner when topics should be contextualized via threads.

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I've heard Zulip is much better about threads, but in Slack there are some annoying things about them. Everything is crammed into the sidebar, so reading log snippets suck. Also, I noticed people will often post their initial message, then a @here with slightly more info in the same channel. I'm not sure where to begin the thread from. I haven't been able to intuit the rules for alerting people or uploading things like images into a thread.

I could be misremembering, but I think Zulip let anyone attach a message to a thread, not just the original writer (I think because it identified threads by text match).

Zulip (and Zephyr) is indeed much better for threads. You can actually find them to use them later. In Slack, it's more like a side-bar, instead of a topic that you could come back to later and anyone throw into.

Whereas I used threads all the time in Zulip, they are really not great in Slack, and mostly just useful for reducing noise for off-topic discussion.

FYI for slack I see a button for "All Threads" or "New Threads" at the top of the left sidebar. Here you can see all your threads in full width glory (instead of crammed into the sidebar which I agree is annoying).

You're right. I don't know if this is a bad habit on my part, but I generally avoid "All Unreads" and "All Threads" because I'm focused on one thing at a time and want to leave unaddressed things unread until I can focus attention on them.

I run a Discord server and this drives me mad. Since Discord doesn't have threads, everything is in the main chat. I know for a fact I'm going to die by being buried in notifications because people can't wait 1 minute to type a response, they need to send each half sentence on its own. Meanwhile, all of my statements appear late because I've taken the time to put the entire thought into one message.

> What I don't understand is how could Slack not see this as an issue?

Similar issues exist in email communications. I feel like these are really more just issues with the person's ability to communicate. Perhaps the technology can help, but I'm having trouble imagining how.

Unfortunately, I've tried to educate some of these types of users that I know (e.g., showing them that Slack's formatting options exist, are easy to use, stop quotes from randomly getting turned into smart quotes), but IME communications skills are one of the last things people are willing to accept feedback on. I find it often just gets acknowledged "oh, that's great, thanks!" and then promptly ignored (no change in behavior).

> They litter the stream by making sentences instead of paragraphs.

You may find this old conversation amusing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614

iirc there is a server side setting to disallow messages without thread.

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