[donatj]

> Use threads for effective team collaboration. Seriously.

Threads are where messages go to die. I don’t have time to read every single thread clicking into it individually. You’re just making work for me, having to figure out what threads I have to read. If it’s in a thread and no one @‘d me, assume I missed it. I read very quickly, I just want to be able to scan all messages in a channel chronologically.

My team begrudgingly moved over from an IRC server about two years ago to the larger corporations Slack and have actively avoided threads in our spaces.

What they should add is an optional unrolled thread view where people can use threads but we can still get the whole thing as a single non-hierarchical timeline I can just scroll, akin to how Signal does replying to specific messages.

[stavros]

Slack's threads design feels like they don't want you to use them. They take a small fraction of the screen, they're awkward to find, and they're awkward to keep open. Zulip has gotten the entire chat thing entirely right, yet Slack continues to treat the most important unit of conversation (the thread) as a fourth-class citizen.

[tomtom1337]

Your suggestion is a really good one. We have channels with several hundred people in it, and there threads are a must. In the smaller team channels I often reply out-of-thread, since it doesn't matter.

[troyvit]

I went from a company of 900 people to a company of 80 and wow what a difference. There was so much noise in the larger company that I'd spend probably 2 hours a day reading slacks (and they rarely threaded messages even). Fast forward to here and it's like a breath of fresh air. They're very conscious about threading and while I now have time to read every thread I can tell at a glance if I should. Doesn't really help your problem except to say that assiduous threading does seem to make it easier at a certain scale to know which messages to ignore.