[Cerium]

Slack does a good job with threading. The side panel allows you to watch a thread while you continue another conversation. It also puts together an above average notification system, where at a glance you can see if there is no new content, new content, or your name mentioned. It allows you to ignore slack without risk of missing somebody shouting for you.

[treesknees]

On the contrary, I find Slack threads to be very annoying for discovering/stumbling upon conversations.

Your whole team could be having a new discussion within a thread and you'd never know unless you participated in the thread previously or somebody @'s you. Compare that to more IRC-like discussion where each message is posted to the channel. Sure, you may end up with contextual issues reminiscent of the IRC days, but at least everything is discoverable.

[bmhin]

I've used Slack competitor Flowdock in the past which did the more "elevated" approach to threads. Rather than "hide" them from the main branch of a channel, the main branch had every message in the top level and you could collapse to a thread view if you wanted to read it in isolation.

In my experience, the main problem here was that people regularly lost sight that a conversation even was in a thread. So they'd post their response unthreaded right in line. Now the people in the thread view can't see it, but if you were in the main channel it still looked just fine (after all they were one after the other). If it was a nascent threaded conversation (like 2 or so posts only), often the thread was just abandoned and everything was done top level. For bigger threads where you caught after the fact it was a threaded, people would either delete and repost or would just duplicate their post over into the thread again (which means it appears twice in the main channel). The worst offenders were people who refused to thread so even if it was humming along fine they'd just post their response inline always (and repeatedly).

Don't know if I have a particular point there other than both had tradeoffs. I do find that the Slack thread updates disappearing seems to be less frequent of an issue and the threading problems in the alternative were near constant. I think Slack's issue would be largely a nonissue if viewing a thread "subscribed" you to it so you could see updates without needing to post. Maybe reactions are a workaround too. It's fairly easy to unsubscribe if one's blowing you up. Subscribing to all threads regardless seems to reduce some of their usefulness and that's the current solution I believe.

[kawsper]

The issue you mention with Flowdock, in my experience, only happened for newcomers to the product, they added a button to add an unthreaded comment to a thread in later versions.

I prefer Flowdocks threading model, it's too bad what happened to the product after being bought/sold, but I think it was a superior product.

[duderific]

> Your whole team could be having a new discussion within a thread and you'd never know unless you participated in the thread previously or somebody @'s you.

That's kind of the point? You shouldn't be bothered unless you want to be. To me, a thread isn't necessarily supposed to be geared toward discoverability. You'll see the main topic hit the channel, and then you can choose to follow the thread if you like.