[SnootyMonkey]

This is an important original post, and I wish the Slack community were having these conversations more often and openly.

The original post nails some important issues: companies really need topic focused discussions, intentional, thoughtful writing, not just chat, more asynch so there is time for deep work and time for more thoughtful discussion and replies, and much better, topic-based search.

I believe in the impact of this problem so deeply that a team of us have been working on an open source solution to it for a couple years now. https://github.com/open-company

What we're trying to build is a place for companies to have focused, asynch discussions about the things that really matter, outside the stream of chat. The UI we've come up with isn't "Reddit-like" really, but it's an attempt to supplement Slack with what's missing, and it will evolve as we learn more.

If anyone is interested in trying it out, you can sign up for early access (we'll get you in very quickly) at: https://carrot.io/

[smoyer]

I don't see how you can ever get something named carrot out of beta (carotene). Your product looks a lot like Yammer (which we have in addition to slack, XMPP and email) in that there are threads. Threads make Yammer better than Slack but there are still two things that I hate (and that Google/Apache Wave got/gets right): 1) Comment threads are hierarchical so side conversations can happen in-line but also be out of the way. 2) Blips that I've read or that I'm not interested in can be collapsed.

The best conversations in Slack should really be a conversation in an issue tracker. Unfortunately, nobody will see those comments when they look at the issue. One issue I see with the carrot UI is that there's not really enough room to have a real conversation in the comments side-panel.