About features:
Calls and screen sharing work well.
Threads are horrible, it's where messages go to hide and die because nobody notices them.
Search is poorly implemented: for some reason it's difficult to find stuff.
A customer of mine would like a mix between a chat and a forum software, to give threads a name and persist them in a menu and reference them later on.
Threads are kinda horses-for-courses.
If you've got a 3000+ person organisation, they're useful because all-to-all messaging channels don't scale very well. If you've got a 500-member #linux-users channel you can have multiple discussions going on in different threads without them getting mixed up, and when someone posts about wifi issues some people can jump in to help without every single message alerting all 500 members.
On the other hand, if your organisation only has 30 people? Channels alone are probably all you need.
https://i.imgur.com/XxV5b2Q.png
Programming discord servers usually have chat rooms like #general and then forum channels (like threads but organized).
If people noticed the top message and they care they can subscribe and get notifications and it won't bother anyone else.
If something is sufficiently important people post the reply in the channel in one go. People can also tag people or groups.
Anyone who isn't using threads fundamentally misunderstands slack and is using it as WhatsApp/Facebook.
You can pin conversations and I agree that giving stuff names would be good but within slack, it would probably be too unwieldy. There's different patterns of communication and slightly ephemeral chat, which is often disorganised shouldn't be your long form. If you want, just copy and paste it but the forum/ticket thread probably deserves better quality.
Zulip is closer to that I think
Here’s a sample convo where you can try out the functionality: https://jonline.io/post/4zHQSj
How much of that was like google wave?
So slack is mostly great for chatting. For audio/video calls it's sub-par (and somehow it messes up with microphone input levels on my work macbook).
But the most important thing: somehow both the two slack-paying jobs had automatic, age-based message deletion.
Not sure why
Excessive record-keeping makes it hard to perform cover-ups, and can lead to regulators having evidence of your crimes - that's the last thing a big corporation wants.
Consider, for example, the case of Boeing where there are a bunch of instant messages from test pilots revealing they knew about the lethal problems with the 737 MAX's MCAS system. Test pilots telling engineers "it’s running rampant in the sim on me" and in other messages saying "so I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)" - very embarrassing stuff.
From Boeing's perspective, it would be very nice if those messages had been automatically deleted a few weeks after they were sent.
Or let's say people removed some bolts from a door, forgot to refit them, and didn't track it through the official system because they wanted to get defect numbers down, then the door fell out mid-flight.
Except someone took timestamped photos showing the door with the bolts missing, so the regulators could figure out what was going on. If Boeing had a process in place to erase those unsanctioned extra records, they could have just shrugged and said there was no evidence the bolts were missing.
Many corporations like time-based message deletion, because although it reduces employee productivity, that's an acceptable trade-off to facilitate cover-ups.
You are right, I wanted to subtly imply that.
I forgot to mention that both jobs were in fields with stringent or very stringent legislation.
So... I guess I'm going to assume/hope that was preventive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Discord does a lot more than a typical chat app like messenger/whataspp and thus UI is more complex. But it is not bad; let alone pretty bad. Their UX is amazing. Complex but great.
But discord is simply the best messaging app out there. Ofc I'd love to have a self hosted discord but...
Anyways, you are free to stay in denial.