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Comment by Arathorn | Hacker News Reader

Historically, Riot's UI hasn't been as smooth as Slack's - for many years we didn't have any professional UX/UI designers contributing to the project, and we built up a lot design debt along the way.

Over the last year or so we've been progressively working through fixing it, and as of Monday we now have three(!) professional designers working full time on the problem. Having turned on E2EE by default, our next big project and single biggest priority is First Time User Experience - making sure that the app is at least as smooth as Slack and Discord, particularly on first impressions. https://blog.riot.im/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing... has more details - and the sections before it show some of the UI/UX work which has been landing in the last few months.

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First off, let me start with thanks :-) As an end user I lack an appreciation for what goes into this; but as someone who writes software, I know the amount of effort that goes into kicking out a polished piece for others to gawk at and comment on. So kudos, definitely.

Further, it is definitely worth taking inspiration from Discord. Newbies seem able to pick it up very quickly. Some Discord rooms feel about as alive as happening IRC channels from back in the day, and the interface+culture seems to do a great job of supporting that.

Fairly subtle, but important things like where the names are placed relative to the messages, and the size of the avatar/image, etc keeps the interface from becoming crowded (in comparison with the Riot desktop interface, for example). The Riot iOS interface gets several of these things right, btw :-)

It also seems to be fairly easy to customize “Discord servers“ with different levels of organization — scaling from few users to 1000+ users. Not just the backend, but the interface also scales very well. From a pure usability standpoint (apart from privacy issues, centralized, etc the user experience in Discord is fantastic.

Let me just note that my beloved boomer parents did not find Discord easy to pick up quickly when the family tried to video chat. (My sainted mother installed Riot because I asked her to, and it's worked so far)

I just played around with Riot for the first time. Can you directly reply to a comment in a chat room like you can in Slack (like the sub chat thing, I'm not sure what to call it)? I actually find this an extremely useful feature that allows rooms to to be uncluttered with side conversations (which as room sizes grow, this becomes a HUGE benefit). I may be missing this or I can't do it in a room of only me?

No, it looks like threads aren't (yet) supported in either Riot or the Matrix spec.

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/2329

https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2349

I believe those are threads and while I have no opinion on the subject because I don't really use slack anymore, I remember them being pretty controversial here.

We have 'replies' (which lets you post a message into the main timeline which refers to an existing message in the timeline), but we don't yet have 'threads' (which lets you branch the conversation into a sidebar).

The protocol actually has support for label-based threading (i.e. "hide all messages tagged #gif" or "only show messages/conversations in this room tagged #work") already, as per https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc232.... But we haven't had a chance to hook this up into Riot yet, thanks to all the work spent on E2EE by default.

Proper threads will come in time however.

Thanks for the reply! Yes, threads. That's what I'm thinking of. I find these super useful. I know some people don't like them, but they can just not use them if that's their preferred style. I would really just like threading a comment rather than having to label everything. I'll be honest, I'll just get lazy and not label. I doubt I'm the only one too, or in the minority.

> Proper threads will come in time however.

Awesome, this was really the only thing that makes me hesitant to switch. I can stand an ugly UI if I can get good conversational flow.

Hot take: slack-style threads are bad for long-form discussion. They encourage forking, when what you really want is everyone to be on the same page. Traditional forum-style threads, or "channels" on a chat app, is optimal for discourse, as it encourages continuous convergence and integration rather than splintering. Hiding tangents serves to lower the quality of conversation.

Optimal within the constraints of real time chat IMHO is slow-mode (5 to 15 seconds, or possibly greater) in a single channel.

IME tangents, while possibly fruitful, just lead people to skip the 30+ messages and so doesn't become helpful.

Hot take: make threading an option. If you don't want them, don't use them. If you want them, then they are available. This is clearly a personal difference with no right or wrong answer. So the solution is options.

I find Zulips threading/topics UI brilliant for certain kinds of channels and discussions.

I hope that Riot will implement something similar, potentially as an individual or per-channel setting.

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