[jpolitz]

I think this has lots of potential. I have thought before that if I could make two changes to Slack (which I already think is pretty great), they would be:

1. Hitting "Enter" doesn't send the message. This encourages writing actual paragraphs in response, rather than sending fragments of sentences

that can be interrupted across multiple lines

because you're not really sure if you've finished your sentence just yet

oh and you thought of one more thing so everyone else please take this line into consideration as well

Of course, you might say "train your team to not do that." Sure. But I'd rather use a tool that doesn't require breaking (perhaps reasonable) habits. And if communication shouldn't be through short bursty chunks by default, why make that the easiest thing to do?

2. Make threads more of a default way to respond, and make thread comments first-class citizens. Presented with the UX of Slack, it's really hard to move yourself towards using threads because the easiest way to respond to things is to type and hit enter. Also, threads live in their own "All threads" space, not organized by channel. Thread comments aren't first-class citizens like regular chat is because they can't have files attached, be posts or snippets, etc, so sometimes it feels like I actually _lose_ functionality by starting a thread.

Twist looks like it has what I love about Slack – good for newbies to join in and see organized, curated history (I can't show new folks _my_ inbox labels and organization, or spin up a new channel on a mailing list for each topic we want to discuss), good for lurking on projects that aren't your own but are related, and has emoji responses for celebration, quick feedback, and commiseration.

[twobyfour]

Threads are pretty awful. It's really easy for messages and discussions to get lost in them and for participants not to realize that more has been said.

[ghthor]

This is a UI/UX problem. You can make the same argument about an unorganized spew tube that I now have to spend 50% of my cognitive ability to organize into a threaded conversation manually in my head.

[twobyfour]

Huh, I've never found following concurrent conversations in Slack particularly challenging, but then I spent a lot of time a handful of years back in fast-moving chats that often had several unrelated discussions going on at once. Maybe it's a learned skill.

That said, in 3 years at Slack-heavy companies, the level of interleaved conversation I've encountered is almost nil. Maybe that's cultural (though the consistency across multiple companies and teams suggests not). Maybe company or team size is a factor. Maybe it's a matter of breaking it out into enough channels that if there are multiple topics to discuss at once they're usually happening in separate channels anyway.

Sure, Slack could probably improve the threads UI. (Though I happen to think that threaded display and real-time discussion are in some ways conflicting goals.) As it stands, however, they're a black hole. My team has actually banned the use of threads (and no, it wasn't even my suggestion).