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Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

We have a culturally enforced strict rule of moving literally ALL new conversations into a subthread and I absolutely LOVE it. This means that if you want to respond to a comment, you never do it in the channel but in the subthread of _that_ comment.

This means that when you browse the channel itself, each individual line represents a conversation on a specific topic. You can essentially browse the "headlines" of the day all in one screen (for most channels), and if you care to hear more about how Bob resolved his problem with those third party build dependencies then you can view the conversation in the subthread.

This also enables folks to opt-in to notifications for channels, if they so desire, without getting overwhelmed with every new message that comes in.

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We do this, too, but I really dislike the thread UX.

Threads should behave like nested channels. Today, that works okay if you click on the "5 replies" link under a message, though it opens up a cramped sidebar instead of taking you to something that feels "nested".

But when there are multiple threads, the only way to juggle them is that "Threads" entry in the man sidebar. It leads to a weird page that doesn't behave like a regular channel. For one, new messages don't come in automatically; it just shows "1 unread reply" or whatever which has to be clicked. Secondly, if you have multiple threads active at once, the view crams all of them into a single scrollable pane.

Threads should, in my opinion, show up as separate entries in the sidebar. And Slack should support having multiple windows open for separate threads and channels, which would make it easier to have multiple conversations going on at the same time.

Having multiple conversations at the same time in threads is really painful.

You would love https://zulipchat.com/ (I have no association with them, their threading model is amazing though)

As an aside, they received an NSF grant for their threading UX.

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1722461&His...

That would be easier to do if Slack had better support for threading. But you can only have one thread open at a time, and if you're in the overall "Threads" view you have to click every single time a new comment comes in before it will show the comment.

This is how I imagined threads working when they were announced, but it seems they are never used consistently. How exactly do you manage to enforce that rule?

Even if this worked, it's just a nice step toward a full comment tree (like HN or reddit). I get the impression some people find that format confusing, but I think it's vastly superior. I assume programmers generally prefer it.

If it's an actual comment tree and not a single level that also mixes in multiple conversations, then it works. Otherwise, it's like trying to use something like Facebook for a discussion platform.

How would HN or reddit look like if every reply to a post also had a single level nested thread that actually consisted of multiple subthreads of conversations with everything at the same level of nesting? It would be much more difficult to follow different subtopics of interest since it would be impossible to filter out posts that aren't pertinent to it.

Zulip has an option to let people move other peoples messages into threads after the fact.

This isn't our standard for all channels, but we do have a channel dedicated to this approach that's meant to contain large direction decisions that are soliciting team opinions. We've also enforced keeping that opening message to a minimum (sort of like a title).

I don't know how I'd feel about all channels being this way (since visibility and notification control are much weaker in this format) but for time limited discussions that may warrant revisiting it's quite helpful.

Isn't this just Microsoft Teams? Not to be a shill (I prefer Teams over Slack but don't love either). In Teams the editor box in each channel creates a new post on which people then comment. Is Slack, a channel is just another group chat. What you do turns Slack into Teams in this regard seems to me. Which as far as I'm concerned is a better system, I just wish Slack had tools to enforce it stricter ways than as a cultural rule.

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