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by ketzo 2030 days ago
Personally, big fan of Slack threads. I use them daily in our team chat -- we can talk in the main chat about anything relevant to the whole team, and if someone has a specific comment on someone's message, they reply and create a thread while the rest of the conversation continues on.

The nesting-within-a-larger-conversation aspect felt very intuitive to me. I've been in other Slack workspaces that didn't use threads nearly as well, though -- I do think they take some "correct usage" to perform well.

1 comments

Personally, I do like the concealed nature of threads within the main conversation, but I do not like how they are presented when opened. The whole "displayed on a narrow pane on the side" seems too cluttered to me. I'd much rather have it expand in the main conversation pane, maybe even create nested threads inside (kind of like reddit/HN).

Thread notifications are another pain point, as others have also noted. For some reason, all thread updates/notifications are clustered together in a separate tab called "Threads", regardless of what channels these threads belong to. If a thread (that I am following) belonging to a channel has an update, shouldn't that channel be highlighted? Now that I think about it, if that channel is highlighted and the user clicks on it, how is the user going to know which thread to check... all I can say is, threading in chat rooms is a non-trivial problem and while Slack gets some part of it right, there's still a ways to go.