[me551ah]

IRC is very different from teams. IRC is a public server and each channel could have 100s of members which leads to an unmanageable firehose.

Are you sure the same problem is also applicable to teams which are going to be much smaller than an irc channel and wouldn't be as busy as IRC? A private channel with a subset of team members wouldn't be the same as a public irc channel.

[ahuang]

(I work at Quill). We've found threading to work really well with teams as small as 3. (2, probably not.) In professional contexts, conversations tend to be about specific topics -- someone posts a GitHub issue, bug report, feature discussion, etc, vs say a more social conversation that is less structured.

It's a way to keep track of the conversations you're having instead of a stream of consciousness (with multiple conversations interleaved) that is often times what people find in a channel. Once you shift to using threads, you sort of unlock a lot of things: revisiting old conversations via search, restarting conversations becomes trivial (all the context is right there!), managing your notifications (per conversation instead of per message now), quickly catching up on what you missed vs. sifting through hundreds of messages.

We're mostly solving for teams bigger than 3, but, we think it's really important that it does scale down to small teams.

[wutbrodo]

> We've found threading to work really well with teams as small as 3. (2, probably not.) I

For what it's worth, my company is (unfortunately) very chat-heavy, and I use threads in two person conversations fairly often. Sometimes conversations branch off of other conversations.

[webmaven]

I'm pretty sure the GP was referring to total team size, not the number of participants in any particular conversation.

[wutbrodo]

Sure, I'm not just talking about participants in a conversation either (with the possibility of a wider audience). Even in DMs, I use threads plenty. Sometimes someone asks multiple questions not realizing that they'll branch off significantly, and threads are a tidy way to address that. I don't see why habits relevant to a DM wouldn't generalize to teams of that size too (in which case you're always DMing).