6 ms·

Threaded messaging comes to Slack

258 points by hswolff 10y ago

johnnycarcin 10y ago
I'm actually a bit sad about this. To me the whole thread thing is the biggest issue with Microsoft Teams. In my opinion it really makes the channel hard to read and keep track of. I like the first part of the Slack implementation where the thread opens up in a new pane on the right but where it falls apart (for me) is how it displays in the main channel.
- Navarr 10y ago
  I feel the same way. I think the way its burried is good for the product. You don't want EVERYTHING to be a thread, but sometimes - rarely, you do want something to be a thread for the sake of the flow of the particular channel.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tabbott 10y ago
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the problem of how to make threading work as the lead developer of Zulip, an open source group chat application where every conversation is threaded, and I think adding Facebook-style comment threads to messages is the wrong approach. Fundamentally, what you want is to be able to read and participate in multiple conversations with a given group of people (a channel) at the same time, with as little overhead as possible, and when catching up later, you want to be able to read one conversation at a time, not all of them mixed together. And you don't want to have to go into some special mode to do so; you want it to feel like the default thing to do. I don't expect this to get a lot of use. The data Slack mentioned to the press shows that even Slack employees hardly use the feature; from http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14305528/slack-threads-threaded-messages http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14305528/slack-threads-thr...: > "But employees at Slack, who have been testing threads for months, say they are meant to complement public channels — not replace them. Joshua Goldenberg, the company's head of design, told me that only 7 or 8 percent of his time in Slack has moved to threads." If the people at Slack's who designed this feature hardly use it, I doubt it's going to solve the big problems with Slack/Hipchat/Campfire/IRC, namely that their chat room model doesn't work once a channel gets beyond a few dozen actually active participants. If you're interested in a good solution to this problem, check out how Zulip does threading (https://zulip.org https://zulip.org has some screenshots (of an old visual design, sadly), or visit the developer community at https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org to see it in action). Zulip's threading is the main reason why it's become the open source group chat application project with the most active development community (see e.g. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/graphs/contributors https://github.com/zulip/zulip/graphs/contributors). (Edited for clarity)
- bluetidepro 10y ago
  Your comment seemed pretty genuine, until you had the 3 paragraph plug for your Zulip product that competes with Slack.
  - tabbott 10y ago
    I've spent a lot of time thinking about all the possible solutions to the problems associated with chat rooms. The issue that it's hard to talk about multiple things at the same time in a channel is common to Slack, IRC, Jabber, and just about everything else. So have spent a long time designing and building a better solution to those problems. It's hard to talk about Slack's threading solution without also talking about what I think is the best way to solve that problem.
    - lima 10y ago
      Zulip is great. After using it for a while, I no longer want to use anything else. The light-weight topics make a lot of sense. You can quickly discuss a topic and then forget about it. With Slack, you'll need to create a new channel, invite people into it, it's just much more overhead so you end up discussing in the main channel. A huge issue with Slack, for me, is catching up with busy channels. You have to read all of it since you miss discussions on topics you're interested in. Zulip has a great solution to this issue. I'm also impressed with how high-quality it is. They even have Nagios checks and everything. It has many features you miss in other products like Rocket Chat (full text search. administrative tools, ...). Edit: relevant comment from another thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281065
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    I found it tasteful and relevant and didn't feel spammy because of the discussion contrasting a feature many people want that Slack doesn't have (or didn't until today and may not still be exactly what we want).
  - bjterry 10y ago
    Zulip is an open source project with no way to purchase it from what the home page shows, so doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
ryanbrunner 10y ago
I really think one of the things that Flowdock nailed was their threading implementation - it took a little bit of getting used to, but not much, and allowed contextual conversation without feeling like the conversation was buried in a thread somewhere (as this implementation does). For people interested in the thread, you could focus on just that, but for everyone else, it just acted like a normal chat room. Considering how long Slack has been promising threading, this seems really half baked and poorly thought out.
- rasjani 10y ago
  Came to mention Flowdock and ask for comparison. On busy channels 'flows' where really good feature. Too bad the product is not that known.
- arjie 10y ago
  FlowDock's threading is vastly superior, in my opinion. Everyone can see progress along threads, and conversations can stay separate.
- maknz 10y ago
  Flowdock was great until CA bought it. Now it's pretty much on life support. No support (it's all 'community' now, whatever that means), buggy as heck, no updates in years, the Twitter account is dead.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    CA makes me wonder if they have a strategy in mind for acquisitions or if the plan is to put them on life support collecting fees from customers too invested to switch.
- truebosko 10y ago
  Never heard of Flowdock but it sounds very compelling. We're currently looking to get our enterprise on Slack and the costs seem .. unreasonable, and I feel that's because Slack is the top player in the game and can ask for such pricing. Hmm.
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
On IRC you just take the discussion to another channel, which can be created ad-hoc and trivially disposed of when no longer necessary. Or you just become good at reading around multiple conversations at once. There's also no expectation that you need to read everything to catch up when you come back after a while - take that to email if you need to. Much better real time chat culture, imo.
- netcraft 10y ago
  I think for me the problem is that the answer to a question may come much later than the question and other conversation might have taken place since. Certainly is the case with our remote team. (that said, I can't get the post to load, so I have no idea if this will help or hurt)
  - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
    Happens all the time, not a problem. On IRC most people direct mentions somewhere - mention them and it'll show up in their notifications when they come online. They'll mention you in their response and show up in your notifications, too. No one having any other conversations is generally bothered by another conversation happening a few lines at a time every few hours.
- bluetidepro 10y ago
  To be fair, that same trivial disposed chat concept you mentioned lives in Slack, as well. It's incredibly easy to quickly make a group DM chat from a channel. > "There's also no expectation that you need to read everything to catch up when you come back after a while - take that to email if you need to." Slack doesn't require that expectation, either. You can easily change settings of Slack to just ignore messages that you were not there for, just like you are describing. While I actually do like IRC also, your two points are pretty weak considering Slack does both of those well, too.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
    I'm not saying Slack doesn't have the features to support this. I think that the addition of threads are a response to a lack of this culture.
PascLeRasc 10y ago
Their site seems to be down, but I really hope Slack doesn't make this permanent. I really like the single discussion stack and the rest of my group I use Slack with isn't techy enough to switch to IRC.
obiefernandez 10y ago
This is annoying. I know people use Slack in different ways, but as a fan and long-time user in a variety of different contexts (from a few users to hundreds) I've never, ever said to myself... "man, I wish Slack had threaded messaging." I worry that they're gonna start messing with what made them special in the first place.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  We've been using Discord at my company. Granted we're in gaming and it's very gamer-oriented, but it fits really well. And it doesn't have threaded messaging :)
  - hug 10y ago
    Discord is by far and away the best Electron app I have ever used. I don't know what their secret sauce is, but it's the first time I haven't run back into the arms of a functionally-inferior competitor product written in literally anything else. It's responsive to input at all times, doesn't eat all of the RAM in sight, and doesn't consume unnecessarily large amounts of CPU cycles. VS Code is second best and somehow manages to best Atom in every way, but is still painfully sluggish at times (on a i7 6500u, no less) and isn't exactly RAM friendly. Slack desktop is basically a dumpster fire, and from what I can tell Slack's attempt at mitigating that are to piss on it.
- mi100hael 10y ago
  All that made them special in the first place was offline history and mobile apps for IRC. If anything, their shitty Electron desktop client is a downgrade.
- scrumper 10y ago
  Yep, fairly heavy user here and it's basically fine for me, probably because I'm used to it. Simplicity works. Only thing I really wish for is a proper, first class, not-electron desktop app.
  - duderific 10y ago
colept 10y ago
For mixed teams, where tech and non-tech types interact - this is brilliant. Each channel has a purpose, but threads allow more efficient cross-talk. For example I work with another team in a different channel because our projects use the same language. Sometimes our work collides as we work with the same libraries. We lose track of details between repos and channels frequently because we operate parallel but separate. Threads will allow us to cross-talk about issues that affect both projects without having to create a new channel for each issue. This also helps one off discussions where two or three people use a public channel when the topic should be private. Ultimately, features like these matter mostly in use and I think this implementation is great for my teams.
VA3FXP 10y ago
So what do you get when you put IRC and Usenet into a blender? A mess. If my memory serves me correctly, isn't this part of what Google Wave was offering? My company uses slack. I despised it at first, I tolerate it now. I suspect that we are not using it to it's full potential either.
- allover 10y ago
  Despise/tolerate/mess? The basic offering is a simple chat client with 'channels' and an easy signup/invite flow afaict.
  - myowncrapulence 10y ago
    Slack is the poor mans IRC. The Dropbox of messaging apps. It's easy but if you want to hide your email from public view or customize anything good luck. Slack is notoriously ignorant to customer requests.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - allover 10y ago
      What exactly is your complaint? > Poor man's IRC What does that mean, fewer features? It's vastly more accessible and the UI easily beats the experience of navigating/selecting/using IRC clients. > The Dropbox of messaging apps I don't know what that means. Dropbox is massively successful for 'just working'. > It's easy but if you want to hide your email from public view or customize anything good luck. Okay that's new to me, could be an issue. Can you elaborate? > Slack is notoriously ignorant to customer requests. Evidence/context?
    - arnvald 10y ago
      Whenever someone compares Slack to IRC I try to imagine my company, where 70% of people are non-technical, using some IRC client as our chat app. There's no way this would happen. Slack was never meant to replace IRC, it was meant to be used at work. Why would you hide your email from your colleagues?
nkantar 10y ago
Is this really more important than some rather basic messaging principles Slack is still ignoring? - No way to ignore/mute users. Yes, I sometimes need to do that even on my team. - Group DMs inherit notification preferences of channels instead of DMs. - No visual distinction between "/me says hi" and "_says hi_". (OK, may be minor, but as a long-time IRC user it's quite annoying.) I can't wait for this threading to introduce the headaches inherent to some users using them and others not.
- nkantar 10y ago
  Another thing I completely forgot about: no mention of keyboard shortcuts for threads...
- okdana 10y ago
  Some other basic issues i have with Slack: * Spell-checking is semi-broken on macOS when you have more than one system language specified. * A few months ago they broke the holding-Shift thing when uploading files. * The fake Markdown is awful. Aside from the fact that the syntax is just close enough to actual Markdown to be confusing — and i realise that's probably not something they'll ever fix, due to inertia if nothing else — the parser is extremely naïve (maybe based on regular expressions?). Notably, it doesn't support escaping, and it has weird issues with certain special characters (for example, it can't render the string `a|b` as in-line code because it contains a pipe). * The cost for the paid version is really steep if your project/organisation is on a limited budget. I wish they would introduce a lower-priced tier. * Maybe they aren't interested in this demographic, but a lot of people really want to use Slack for non-business-related purposes, and they've done nothing really to make that easy in terms of administration/management. Many people with this use case are moving to Discord, which is a shame in my opinion because the Slack client, despite its problems, is still (for now, at least) vastly superior for text-based communication. * I know it's kind of petty, but they haven't updated the client to support the emoji added since Unicode 8.0 in summer of 2015.
  - baddox 10y ago
    Well good, at least the Shift upload thing isn't just me. That's been frustrating.
chx 10y ago
The footer is broken, the "multiple people typing" leads to the front page.
tdburn 10y ago
Last year they announced this was coming and I've been looking forward to it. I originally liked the implementation in flow dock. Maybe they'll put this out there for experiment and refine it to something that works. And maybe they should make it a feature that can be enabled or disabled as a team
jzl 10y ago
Funniest part of all this? This twitter account devoted entirely to the question of threads on Slack and the shout-out to them by Slack's twitter account today: https://twitter.com/slackthreadsyet https://twitter.com/slackthreadsyet
krn1p4n1c 10y ago
IIRC mattermost added this in v3.3.0.
- it33 10y ago
  Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention! Mattermost had threaded messaging since 2015, it used to be called "Replies" and we renamed it "Threaded messages" in April 2016: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-3-4-7/ https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-3-4-7/ If anyone wants to try it out, you can join https://demo.mattermost.com/ https://demo.mattermost.com/ Mattermost is an open source, private cloud Slack-alternative. We're "Slack-compatible, not Slack limited" and you'll find all the core features of Slack plus many benefits added by the open source community--like markdown support, translation into 11 languages, multi-team accounts, searchable hashtags and much more: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...
  - dwndwn 10y ago
    hey, can you guys write a native android app? web-embedded is unacceptably slow. this is a core feature of slack.
  - krn1p4n1c 10y ago
    No problem, I'm a fan of the product. Been using it since v2.1.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
What I want more is columns in Slack so I can see conversations in multiple rooms without having to click back and forth on them whenever a new message pops up. It's annoying that I can only see one at one time when I have so much screen space.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  They used to have scaling issues (maybe still do for certain userbase sizes) so it might not be feasible for them to effectively double the amount of real-ish time updates. It would be really handy for informational channels where generally you're just interested in reading updates, not replying. Something like that could reasonably live in the right-hand sidebar. Taken a step further, it would be really cool to be able to specify an official informational/status sidebar channel to be paired with your channel. For example: a team channel with a build status channel linked to it by default.
ak217 10y ago
Came here to mention Flowdock. IMO Flowdock nailed the chat UI layout for modern chat systems with API-driven integrations. It's too bad it hasn't seen wider adoption, since its bigger competitors, especially Slack, still have no clue how to fix the noise and focus problems. Flowdock introduced three killer features that I still haven't seen properly matched by anyone else: - It introduced threading. (Why we're here) - It introduced a seamless, intuitive way to switch between the unfiltered channel and a single thread (or to start a thread), by clicking on the colored bubbles next to each message. - It separated bots from humans (inbox vs chat), making it very easy to have or follow a high value conversation without being interrupted or distracted by a stream of bot announcements. I think Slack has a lot to learn from Flowdock. I miss Flowdock dearly now that Slack is the de facto standard that everyone uses.
newman314 10y ago
I would rather have subchannels than threads.
spilk 10y ago
Maybe I'm just overly paranoid but I've never understood the appeal of Slack - I personally don't want to ship all of my internal proprietary business communications offsite to a third party.
- wapz 10y ago
  I think it really depends on what your team needs to discuss, but from my slack chats we don't discuss any business-breaking proprietary intel. If there's something important a face-to-face meeting is used or video chat (but that's also through hangouts)
maxekman 10y ago
I think threads are a great addition but the way they seem to hide the discussion makes it so much less useful. It would be better to just indent the messages and keep the normal flow around it.
neximo64 10y ago
Yet still no speed improvements, after all these years.
disordinary 10y ago
It's a welcome addition. I work remotely and virtually all our correspondence goes through slack, it's quite easy to lose important information and the search isn't that great. However the problem is if you use Slack for anything other than transient information then you increase the problem with information sitting in silos, already we've got transient information in slack, information in the project management software, information in the kanban type software, information in issues on github, etc. You add Slack into the mix and it really gets hard to remember what is where. A service to pull together all the information is probably the next killer product.
EGreg 10y ago
Why not simply have threads be channels that are children of other channels? This way you discourage branching but allow an unlimited amount of it. And each thread has the same properties and rules as a channel. All you have to do then is solve the problem of listing the channels in the sidebar, which the user is participating in, in a hierarchical way. A user should be able to leave a thread and it would disappear from their sidebar. Simple. What's wrong with this model?

258 points by hswolff 10y ago

I'm actually a bit sad about this. To me the whole thread thing is the biggest issue with Microsoft Teams. In my opinion it really makes the channel hard to read and keep track of. I like the first part of the Slack implementation where the thread opens up in a new pane on the right but where it falls apart (for me) is how it displays in the main channel.

Navarr 10y ago
I feel the same way. I think the way its burried is good for the product. You don't want EVERYTHING to be a thread, but sometimes - rarely, you do want something to be a thread for the sake of the flow of the particular channel.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tabbott 10y ago

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the problem of how to make threading work as the lead developer of Zulip, an open source group chat application where every conversation is threaded, and I think adding Facebook-style comment threads to messages is the wrong approach. Fundamentally, what you want is to be able to read and participate in multiple conversations with a given group of people (a channel) at the same time, with as little overhead as possible, and when catching up later, you want to be able to read one conversation at a time, not all of them mixed together. And you don't want to have to go into some special mode to do so; you want it to feel like the default thing to do. I don't expect this to get a lot of use. The data Slack mentioned to the press shows that even Slack employees hardly use the feature; from http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14305528/slack-threads-threaded-messages http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14305528/slack-threads-thr...: > "But employees at Slack, who have been testing threads for months, say they are meant to complement public channels — not replace them. Joshua Goldenberg, the company's head of design, told me that only 7 or 8 percent of his time in Slack has moved to threads." If the people at Slack's who designed this feature hardly use it, I doubt it's going to solve the big problems with Slack/Hipchat/Campfire/IRC, namely that their chat room model doesn't work once a channel gets beyond a few dozen actually active participants. If you're interested in a good solution to this problem, check out how Zulip does threading (https://zulip.org https://zulip.org has some screenshots (of an old visual design, sadly), or visit the developer community at https://chat.zulip.org https://chat.zulip.org to see it in action). Zulip's threading is the main reason why it's become the open source group chat application project with the most active development community (see e.g. https://github.com/zulip/zulip/graphs/contributors https://github.com/zulip/zulip/graphs/contributors). (Edited for clarity)

bluetidepro 10y ago
Your comment seemed pretty genuine, until you had the 3 paragraph plug for your Zulip product that competes with Slack.
- tabbott 10y ago
  I've spent a lot of time thinking about all the possible solutions to the problems associated with chat rooms. The issue that it's hard to talk about multiple things at the same time in a channel is common to Slack, IRC, Jabber, and just about everything else. So have spent a long time designing and building a better solution to those problems. It's hard to talk about Slack's threading solution without also talking about what I think is the best way to solve that problem.
  - lima 10y ago
    Zulip is great. After using it for a while, I no longer want to use anything else. The light-weight topics make a lot of sense. You can quickly discuss a topic and then forget about it. With Slack, you'll need to create a new channel, invite people into it, it's just much more overhead so you end up discussing in the main channel. A huge issue with Slack, for me, is catching up with busy channels. You have to read all of it since you miss discussions on topics you're interested in. Zulip has a great solution to this issue. I'm also impressed with how high-quality it is. They even have Nagios checks and everything. It has many features you miss in other products like Rocket Chat (full text search. administrative tools, ...). Edit: relevant comment from another thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10281065
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I found it tasteful and relevant and didn't feel spammy because of the discussion contrasting a feature many people want that Slack doesn't have (or didn't until today and may not still be exactly what we want).
- bjterry 10y ago
  Zulip is an open source project with no way to purchase it from what the home page shows, so doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.

ryanbrunner 10y ago

I really think one of the things that Flowdock nailed was their threading implementation - it took a little bit of getting used to, but not much, and allowed contextual conversation without feeling like the conversation was buried in a thread somewhere (as this implementation does). For people interested in the thread, you could focus on just that, but for everyone else, it just acted like a normal chat room. Considering how long Slack has been promising threading, this seems really half baked and poorly thought out.

rasjani 10y ago
Came to mention Flowdock and ask for comparison. On busy channels 'flows' where really good feature. Too bad the product is not that known.
arjie 10y ago
FlowDock's threading is vastly superior, in my opinion. Everyone can see progress along threads, and conversations can stay separate.
maknz 10y ago
Flowdock was great until CA bought it. Now it's pretty much on life support. No support (it's all 'community' now, whatever that means), buggy as heck, no updates in years, the Twitter account is dead.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  CA makes me wonder if they have a strategy in mind for acquisitions or if the plan is to put them on life support collecting fees from customers too invested to switch.
truebosko 10y ago
Never heard of Flowdock but it sounds very compelling. We're currently looking to get our enterprise on Slack and the costs seem .. unreasonable, and I feel that's because Slack is the top player in the game and can ask for such pricing. Hmm.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

On IRC you just take the discussion to another channel, which can be created ad-hoc and trivially disposed of when no longer necessary. Or you just become good at reading around multiple conversations at once. There's also no expectation that you need to read everything to catch up when you come back after a while - take that to email if you need to. Much better real time chat culture, imo.

netcraft 10y ago
I think for me the problem is that the answer to a question may come much later than the question and other conversation might have taken place since. Certainly is the case with our remote team. (that said, I can't get the post to load, so I have no idea if this will help or hurt)
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Happens all the time, not a problem. On IRC most people direct mentions somewhere - mention them and it'll show up in their notifications when they come online. They'll mention you in their response and show up in your notifications, too. No one having any other conversations is generally bothered by another conversation happening a few lines at a time every few hours.
bluetidepro 10y ago
To be fair, that same trivial disposed chat concept you mentioned lives in Slack, as well. It's incredibly easy to quickly make a group DM chat from a channel. > "There's also no expectation that you need to read everything to catch up when you come back after a while - take that to email if you need to." Slack doesn't require that expectation, either. You can easily change settings of Slack to just ignore messages that you were not there for, just like you are describing. While I actually do like IRC also, your two points are pretty weak considering Slack does both of those well, too.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  I'm not saying Slack doesn't have the features to support this. I think that the addition of threads are a response to a lack of this culture.

PascLeRasc 10y ago

Their site seems to be down, but I really hope Slack doesn't make this permanent. I really like the single discussion stack and the rest of my group I use Slack with isn't techy enough to switch to IRC.

obiefernandez 10y ago

This is annoying. I know people use Slack in different ways, but as a fan and long-time user in a variety of different contexts (from a few users to hundreds) I've never, ever said to myself... "man, I wish Slack had threaded messaging." I worry that they're gonna start messing with what made them special in the first place.

scrollaway 10y ago
We've been using Discord at my company. Granted we're in gaming and it's very gamer-oriented, but it fits really well. And it doesn't have threaded messaging :)
- hug 10y ago
  Discord is by far and away the best Electron app I have ever used. I don't know what their secret sauce is, but it's the first time I haven't run back into the arms of a functionally-inferior competitor product written in literally anything else. It's responsive to input at all times, doesn't eat all of the RAM in sight, and doesn't consume unnecessarily large amounts of CPU cycles. VS Code is second best and somehow manages to best Atom in every way, but is still painfully sluggish at times (on a i7 6500u, no less) and isn't exactly RAM friendly. Slack desktop is basically a dumpster fire, and from what I can tell Slack's attempt at mitigating that are to piss on it.
mi100hael 10y ago
All that made them special in the first place was offline history and mobile apps for IRC. If anything, their shitty Electron desktop client is a downgrade.
scrumper 10y ago
Yep, fairly heavy user here and it's basically fine for me, probably because I'm used to it. Simplicity works. Only thing I really wish for is a proper, first class, not-electron desktop app.
- duderific 10y ago

colept 10y ago

For mixed teams, where tech and non-tech types interact - this is brilliant. Each channel has a purpose, but threads allow more efficient cross-talk. For example I work with another team in a different channel because our projects use the same language. Sometimes our work collides as we work with the same libraries. We lose track of details between repos and channels frequently because we operate parallel but separate. Threads will allow us to cross-talk about issues that affect both projects without having to create a new channel for each issue. This also helps one off discussions where two or three people use a public channel when the topic should be private. Ultimately, features like these matter mostly in use and I think this implementation is great for my teams.

VA3FXP 10y ago

So what do you get when you put IRC and Usenet into a blender? A mess. If my memory serves me correctly, isn't this part of what Google Wave was offering? My company uses slack. I despised it at first, I tolerate it now. I suspect that we are not using it to it's full potential either.

allover 10y ago
Despise/tolerate/mess? The basic offering is a simple chat client with 'channels' and an easy signup/invite flow afaict.
- myowncrapulence 10y ago
  Slack is the poor mans IRC. The Dropbox of messaging apps. It's easy but if you want to hide your email from public view or customize anything good luck. Slack is notoriously ignorant to customer requests.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - allover 10y ago
    What exactly is your complaint? > Poor man's IRC What does that mean, fewer features? It's vastly more accessible and the UI easily beats the experience of navigating/selecting/using IRC clients. > The Dropbox of messaging apps I don't know what that means. Dropbox is massively successful for 'just working'. > It's easy but if you want to hide your email from public view or customize anything good luck. Okay that's new to me, could be an issue. Can you elaborate? > Slack is notoriously ignorant to customer requests. Evidence/context?
  - arnvald 10y ago
    Whenever someone compares Slack to IRC I try to imagine my company, where 70% of people are non-technical, using some IRC client as our chat app. There's no way this would happen. Slack was never meant to replace IRC, it was meant to be used at work. Why would you hide your email from your colleagues?

nkantar 10y ago

Is this really more important than some rather basic messaging principles Slack is still ignoring? - No way to ignore/mute users. Yes, I sometimes need to do that even on my team. - Group DMs inherit notification preferences of channels instead of DMs. - No visual distinction between "/me says hi" and "_says hi_". (OK, may be minor, but as a long-time IRC user it's quite annoying.) I can't wait for this threading to introduce the headaches inherent to some users using them and others not.

nkantar 10y ago
Another thing I completely forgot about: no mention of keyboard shortcuts for threads...
okdana 10y ago
Some other basic issues i have with Slack: * Spell-checking is semi-broken on macOS when you have more than one system language specified. * A few months ago they broke the holding-Shift thing when uploading files. * The fake Markdown is awful. Aside from the fact that the syntax is just close enough to actual Markdown to be confusing — and i realise that's probably not something they'll ever fix, due to inertia if nothing else — the parser is extremely naïve (maybe based on regular expressions?). Notably, it doesn't support escaping, and it has weird issues with certain special characters (for example, it can't render the string `a|b` as in-line code because it contains a pipe). * The cost for the paid version is really steep if your project/organisation is on a limited budget. I wish they would introduce a lower-priced tier. * Maybe they aren't interested in this demographic, but a lot of people really want to use Slack for non-business-related purposes, and they've done nothing really to make that easy in terms of administration/management. Many people with this use case are moving to Discord, which is a shame in my opinion because the Slack client, despite its problems, is still (for now, at least) vastly superior for text-based communication. * I know it's kind of petty, but they haven't updated the client to support the emoji added since Unicode 8.0 in summer of 2015.
- baddox 10y ago
  Well good, at least the Shift upload thing isn't just me. That's been frustrating.

chx 10y ago

The footer is broken, the "multiple people typing" leads to the front page.

tdburn 10y ago

Last year they announced this was coming and I've been looking forward to it. I originally liked the implementation in flow dock. Maybe they'll put this out there for experiment and refine it to something that works. And maybe they should make it a feature that can be enabled or disabled as a team

jzl 10y ago

Funniest part of all this? This twitter account devoted entirely to the question of threads on Slack and the shout-out to them by Slack's twitter account today: https://twitter.com/slackthreadsyet https://twitter.com/slackthreadsyet

krn1p4n1c 10y ago

IIRC mattermost added this in v3.3.0.

it33 10y ago
Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention! Mattermost had threaded messaging since 2015, it used to be called "Replies" and we renamed it "Threaded messages" in April 2016: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-3-4-7/ https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-3-4-7/ If anyone wants to try it out, you can join https://demo.mattermost.com/ https://demo.mattermost.com/ Mattermost is an open source, private cloud Slack-alternative. We're "Slack-compatible, not Slack limited" and you'll find all the core features of Slack plus many benefits added by the open source community--like markdown support, translation into 11 languages, multi-team accounts, searchable hashtags and much more: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...
- dwndwn 10y ago
  hey, can you guys write a native android app? web-embedded is unacceptably slow. this is a core feature of slack.
- krn1p4n1c 10y ago
  No problem, I'm a fan of the product. Been using it since v2.1.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

What I want more is columns in Slack so I can see conversations in multiple rooms without having to click back and forth on them whenever a new message pops up. It's annoying that I can only see one at one time when I have so much screen space.

brazzledazzle 10y ago
They used to have scaling issues (maybe still do for certain userbase sizes) so it might not be feasible for them to effectively double the amount of real-ish time updates. It would be really handy for informational channels where generally you're just interested in reading updates, not replying. Something like that could reasonably live in the right-hand sidebar. Taken a step further, it would be really cool to be able to specify an official informational/status sidebar channel to be paired with your channel. For example: a team channel with a build status channel linked to it by default.

ak217 10y ago

Came here to mention Flowdock. IMO Flowdock nailed the chat UI layout for modern chat systems with API-driven integrations. It's too bad it hasn't seen wider adoption, since its bigger competitors, especially Slack, still have no clue how to fix the noise and focus problems. Flowdock introduced three killer features that I still haven't seen properly matched by anyone else: - It introduced threading. (Why we're here) - It introduced a seamless, intuitive way to switch between the unfiltered channel and a single thread (or to start a thread), by clicking on the colored bubbles next to each message. - It separated bots from humans (inbox vs chat), making it very easy to have or follow a high value conversation without being interrupted or distracted by a stream of bot announcements. I think Slack has a lot to learn from Flowdock. I miss Flowdock dearly now that Slack is the de facto standard that everyone uses.

newman314 10y ago

I would rather have subchannels than threads.

spilk 10y ago

Maybe I'm just overly paranoid but I've never understood the appeal of Slack - I personally don't want to ship all of my internal proprietary business communications offsite to a third party.

wapz 10y ago
I think it really depends on what your team needs to discuss, but from my slack chats we don't discuss any business-breaking proprietary intel. If there's something important a face-to-face meeting is used or video chat (but that's also through hangouts)

maxekman 10y ago

I think threads are a great addition but the way they seem to hide the discussion makes it so much less useful. It would be better to just indent the messages and keep the normal flow around it.

neximo64 10y ago

Yet still no speed improvements, after all these years.

disordinary 10y ago

It's a welcome addition. I work remotely and virtually all our correspondence goes through slack, it's quite easy to lose important information and the search isn't that great. However the problem is if you use Slack for anything other than transient information then you increase the problem with information sitting in silos, already we've got transient information in slack, information in the project management software, information in the kanban type software, information in issues on github, etc. You add Slack into the mix and it really gets hard to remember what is where. A service to pull together all the information is probably the next killer product.

EGreg 10y ago

Why not simply have threads be channels that are children of other channels? This way you discourage branching but allow an unlimited amount of it. And each thread has the same properties and rules as a channel. All you have to do then is solve the problem of listing the channels in the sidebar, which the user is participating in, in a hierarchical way. A user should be able to leave a thread and it would disappear from their sidebar. Simple. What's wrong with this model?