Piling on about chat. Slack threads are an abomination. They aren’t inline with the main channel so you can’t cut and paste an entire conversation with threads. And does exporting a channel include threads? Who knows because the admin wouldn’t do it for me.
Threads were introduced in, what, late 2016? The start of 2017? Some time around then, anyway. They were even more badly integrated at the start; there was no way to be notified about new messages in a thread, for example. By 2019 things were a little better, but - as you noticed - still not great.
And since then... nothing. No more improvements. Development seems to have more or less halted since the Salesforce acquisition.
I used irc for a couple of decades before Slack, so was happy with purely linear chat (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git). Threads make everything more horrible, but at this point it feels like I just have to put up with it.
> (yeah, I'm also one of those weirdos who likes rebasing in git).
I like both rebasing and threads. More generally, I hate hate hate the 20+ individual messages on a single topic in a channel. It's just so annoying, threads are great for stuff like that, and give you one target for a reminder/update on whatever the issue is.
And yet, every time I change companies I realise again how much most people just don't threads on Slack.
it's not the existence of threads that are the problem but their presentation. instead of hidden threads i'd prefer to be able to quote an message and have it shown inline. the fact that threads are so hidden is a major reason to avoid using them (for me at least)
alternatives:
discord has inline quoting and threads. treads are a bit more visible.
zulip creates a new thread for every message because it prompts you to set a topic, and then you browse the messages by topic.
Nobody uses them? You need better companies :-)) I've worked at a startup using Slack and a huge company using Slack plus I've seen a bunch of other companies. They were all using threads everywhere, they're incredibly useful, especially for big or active channels.
> Nobody uses them? You need better companies :-))
To be fair, this is hyperbolic. To clarify, small groups within most orgs tend not to use threads in their internal channels AND congratulate everyone on their birthdays. The combination of this irritates me due to repeated notification spam.
