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by jc4p 3433 days ago
I agree wth this comment a lot.

I work at Stack Overflow, where our company chat is split between Slack and an internal chat product we made ourselves years ago.

I think the "comments as threads" concept helps solve some specific use cases (like room clutter) but not the use cases I personally care about the most.

The "in-line method" mentioned in this other article about the change is my preferred method: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067246/innovation-agents/the-un...

My gripe doesn't stem from rooms being too cluttered, it stems from if there are 4 people talking at once and I'm in two different conversations chains with them, I'd like to explicitly reply to a specific message and carry on the convo. not hide it in a comment thread.

On our homebuilt chat product this is the difference between starting a message with `@Name` or hitting "reply" on a specific message and having `@:{Message Id}` as the beginning of your message.

It shows the same to the users, they seen `@Name`, but if it's a specific message reply when they hover over the message the one it's in response to gets highlighted (and there's a button to scroll to it if it's off-screen).

I think this Slack feature, like most features, is targeted at helping people using chat sitting in the same room or office together.

I work at a very remote company where with some people I share less than 2 hours of a work day. I want better chat tools centered around making our async communication flow better. Not out-of-room comment threads.

2 comments

> I want better chat tools centered around making our async communication flow better.

Try Zulip, actually. We use it and it does that exact thing very well.

Any ldap or ad integration?
It would be quite amusing if it couldn't work with AD, considering Zulip is based on Zephyr which is a very old chat protocol/application heavily dependent on Kerberos.
Just FYI, Zulip uses a similar UI model to Zephyr, but doesn't use the Zephyr protocol internally. (For example, Zephyr doesn't really work when one user is behind a NAT)

(I worked for Zulip, and have contributed to the open-source project)

>The "in-line method" mentioned in this [FastCompany] article about the change is my preferred method: My gripe doesn't stem from rooms being too cluttered, it stems from if there are 4 people talking at once and I'm in two different conversations chains with them, I'd like to explicitly reply to a specific message and carry on the convo. not hide it in a comment thread.

It's fascinating that the preferences for "flat view vs thread view" get revisited in newer software. Fyi, Jeff Atwood blogged about this 10 years ago in 2006.[1]

Thank you for linking that FastCompany article because it emphasizes that Slack's distinguishing rationale was to visually place threads in a different area of the screen. Whether that proves to be the best tradeoff between flat-vs-thread remains to be seen in the marketplace of ideas.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/