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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Oh my god the absolute worst thing about slack are threads. Can we please not bring them to anything else? how do they provide any value whatsoever other than making it hard to realize someone responded to you?

Signed, Someone who used IRC for decades

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Personally, big fan of Slack threads. I use them daily in our team chat -- we can talk in the main chat about anything relevant to the whole team, and if someone has a specific comment on someone's message, they reply and create a thread while the rest of the conversation continues on.

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.

Personally, I do like the concealed nature of threads within the main conversation, but I do not like how they are presented when opened. The whole "displayed on a narrow pane on the side" seems too cluttered to me. I'd much rather have it expand in the main conversation pane, maybe even create nested threads inside (kind of like reddit/HN).

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.

I used to think the same thing regarding threads and I think slack's UI for them is bad (pushing them to a side window and squishing the main chat) but I have found them useful a few times recently. Often times a channel will have several different topics going on and the ability to push a conversation into a thread has been useful to avoid cross talk.

Slack threads are unusable. I don't know about you, but I never ever notice them when someone makes the mistake of starting a new one.

Slack - Too much thread

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.

Discord threads are much closer to IRC than slack threads.

Isn't the whole point of notifications to make it apparent when someone has responded to your thread?

What notifications? They're all off, we talk 90% async. And it's impossible to see a thread that you don't know about in their UI.

If everyone's talking asynchronously, why not use email?

- talking async is a lot less friction than sending emails

- 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.

I mean, you can't really disable notifications that exist for a feature and then complain that you're not notified when somebody messages you using that feature...

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.

> 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.

How does that help with noticing threads that someone created while I wasn't looking?

Completely agree, threads confuse me and feel unnecessary. One colleague uses them, but no one else and I always miss them.

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