This is a major win for Discord.
The one feature I wish they'd clone from Slack are threaded replies. I know they're rolling out a new way to reply, but it still makes the chat flow messy. I really enjoyed the way Slack allows for breakout threads/replies to a particular message. It was a great way to display enough context, but not make the flow confusing.
Signed, Someone who used IRC for decades
- you have your info pre separated in channels instead of needing to sort your emails into folders
- you can pin important data to the channel for future reference
- even sending small files is less complicated via a chat app
- you can get up to date just by scrolling up a bit
That's all I could think of in 2 minutes.
If it's truly async then just close slack until you're ready to talk, then open it back up and go through all of the red badges / white channels.
If you absolutely need to keep all notifications off and still want to read any thread replies, the very top channel in the slack app is called "Threads" and will show threads you've participated in or subscribed to, listed in chronological order based on most recent replies.
I have a lot of problems with slack (namely, performance and lack of solid video/audio calling), but threads are fine.
How does that help with noticing threads that someone created while I wasn't looking?
Discord - Not enough thread
M$ Teams - Just right thread
As much as I hate to say it, after using all three, I definitely like the Teams threads the best. That model offers the best balance of visibility and organization that I have seen.
The nesting-within-a-larger-conversation aspect felt very intuitive to me. I've been in other Slack workspaces that didn't use threads nearly as well, though -- I do think they take some "correct usage" to perform well.
Thread notifications are another pain point, as others have also noted. For some reason, all thread updates/notifications are clustered together in a separate tab called "Threads", regardless of what channels these threads belong to. If a thread (that I am following) belonging to a channel has an update, shouldn't that channel be highlighted? Now that I think about it, if that channel is highlighted and the user clicks on it, how is the user going to know which thread to check... all I can say is, threading in chat rooms is a non-trivial problem and while Slack gets some part of it right, there's still a ways to go.
In practice you're going to get violators, but that happens with Slack as well. In part because Slack's thread UI sucks so occasionally you'll wake up and see a couple people in after-hours last night who just didn't care and filled up 50-100 messages on the unthreaded channel, forcing people to skim through it or if they were foolish enough to leave notifications on after-hours to get all these pings.
One nice thing basically all modern chat systems have is easy group chat, so you don't have to create a new room, but rooms are nice too. e.g. any time we had a customer case requiring a few people to look into it, we'd just create a slack channel for it instead of using threads on the team channel. After a while someone would archive the channel.
Then there are people who use threads and occasionally click the "send to whole room" option which really screws up notifications. You're looking at it right there in the main team chat, but you have to open the thread or your notifications to dismiss the notification.
Next time I'm forced to use Slack I'll use Ripcord. You know what UI I miss most and would help Slack/Discord/Element tremendously? Tabs.
Our smallish company has used Discord all year long for our company communication and I could hardly be happier. They have an excellent bot API, a super clean yet playful interface, instant search and just don't feel/smell as "enterprisey" as Slack already felt (and that was well before now being acquired by Salesforce).
If Discord can maintain all those things and add a bit more Microsoft integration, they have a huge opportunity here.
(Either that or Microsoft can preempt the whole thing and acquire Discord).
Discord's entire business model seemed to be geared toward toppling Steam by perfecting community features and then expanding into digital sales. Right when they launched their game store, Epic Games started one too and was throwing around Fortnite money to lock in exclusives. Discord quickly retreated and has seemed rudderless for the past year.
They already started shifting away from their gamer branding. Earlier this year they generalized to online communities. And they have a formidable architecture. Some game servers have 6 digit user counts. Their permission model is also way more robust than Slack's, and that's not an easy gap to close given how tightly woven into the architecture a permission model needs to be.
In comparison to Slack, this all could have been had for pennies on the dollar. They must really want the brand, or the customer base, or to already have the enterprise feature gap closed.
maybe they'll spin off a business oriented division with a different name,
Slack started as an internal business tool and it remains so.
It just doesn't present itself as something you'd consider for your business.
Business, for worse, will demand features catered to their workflow.
That was easy.
‘And we’re going public on day 1!’
It will be interesting how this impacts Mattermost [1] though - an open source developer collaboration tool for Enterprises, a closer competitor to Slack.