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Discord Launches Threads

blog.discord.com

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Re: Discord Launches Threads

#181

Post by lamontcg »

enraged_camel wrote: post #53
arkitaip wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is after Slack's market share and offering threads makes sense in many contexts where the discussion isn't casual.

Man, I wish Slack would implement Discords "reply" feature that automatically quotes the post and @mentions the poster.

Counterpoint: I wish that feature would go away on Discord, it gets used a lot by very low information users to pester other people all the time.

And its just annoying to see all the duplicated text. If you have several people in a discussion or there's two threads of conversation going on I sort of get the idea that you want to respond to a specific comment -- but there are ways to use the English language to indicate clearly what you're responding to. Even if its just "re: whatever, ..."

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#182

Post by sagichmal »

aerovistae wrote: post #82
whall6 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Slack threads are unbearable.

I guess I would have to use Flowdock to understand -- those gifs were confusing and unclear to me. I'm not sure what I was looking at. Personally I find slack threads perfectly usable and helpful for keeping things organized for the most part. What's the issue with them? I found them a revolutionary step forward in chat UX to be honest, something that had been missing for 20 years or more.

Tell me how to (a) identify an interesting thread, (b) view its contents, (c) contribute to it, and (d) return to it after closing the app, without using the mouse.

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#183

Post by sagichmal »

steveklabnik wrote: post #105
sitharus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people - like myself - prefer to see all the messages go past and mentally thread them. It’s a skill I learnt from many years of irc use. Others prefer to click through and not think about thread content until they choose to. Also I’d rather not grab my mouse to see things.

> Also I’d rather not grab my mouse to see things. I have not tried threads yet but I have been assured they are fully accessible via the keyboard only.

They emphatically are not.

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#184

Post by ickyforce »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #131

Remind me the difference between Slack and Discord at this point? "Default theme" is the big one that comes to mind It's fine, not every product needs to be super original I guess, but it's gotten to the point where choosing one over the other is barely even a statement about your identity anymore. Although I guess most people do both: Slack for work, Discord for friends. It's boring when those two experiences are so…

> Remind me the difference between Slack and Discord at this point?

Discord: you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service

Slack: the Customer [...] grants us and the Slack Extended Family a worldwide, non-exclusive, limited-term licence to access, use, process, copy, distribute, perform, export and display Customer Data and any Non-Slack Products created by or for the Customer, only as reasonably necessary (a) to provide, maintain and update the Services; (b) to prevent or address service, security, support or technical issues; (c) as required by law or as permitted by the data request policy; and (d) as expressly permitted in writing by the Customer.

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#185

Post by sagichmal »

kowbell wrote: post #61
gentleman11 wrote: post #51

Threads are great for helping you to actively ignore a discussion, but discord is a casual discussion app. Threads make it harder and weirder for people to chime in halfway through or to catch up on what people have been saying. Channels are used to group conversation topics that some people might want to ignore. I’d rather not have threads

> Threads make it harder and weirder for people to chime in halfway through or to catch up on what people have been saying I’m of the completely opposite opinion. If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream. With a thread, I can respond to who I want without interrupting anyone…

> If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream.

Yes, this is the essential nature of real-time chat. The channel already serves as the demarcation of topic.

What you're describing is a forum, a totally different modality.

> Direct replies to the messages help but they still exist in that linear main chat stream, so there’s still a lot of clutter that everyone has to navigate through.

This isn't clutter, it's literally the point of the tool.

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#186

Post by rendaw »

mxmilkiib wrote: post #180
Multicomp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. Zulip calls what Discord and Slack refer to as "channels", "streams", and what Discord calls "threads", "topics". Zulip's superior topic UX was why I went with it over Slack & Discord. Now Discord has feature-parity there and even more with 'private' topics/threads. I have to create a separate channel/stream if I want some topics to be private. So now, since my users love Discord so much, I'm going to be fen…

Personally, I'm waiting for Matrix to implement Zulip-like threads (and a client that looks like Quassel).

Does the matrix protocol require modifications to get zulip-like threads?

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#187

Post by [deleted] »

chejazi wrote: post #150
asah wrote: post #146

am I the only one who just thinks Reddit/Disqus threads are the way to go? (collapsable and deep-linkable) what am I missing?

> (collapsable and deep-linkable) I see other major differences. Discord and other chat-apps invite much more real time participation than the other two you just mentioned. Also discord you have to be logged in to be part of a server, not much casual lurking going on.

[deleted]

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#189

Post by kowbell »

sagichmal wrote: post #185
kowbell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Threads make it harder and weirder for people to chime in halfway through or to catch up on what people have been saying I’m of the completely opposite opinion. If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream. With a thread, I can respond to who I want without interrupting anyone…

> If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream. Yes, this is the essential nature of real-time chat. The channel already serves as the demarcation of topic. What you're describing is a forum, a totally different modality. > Direct replies to the messages help but they still exis…

> Yes, this is the essential nature of real-time chat.

Discord can be real-time, it can also be slightly-slower-than-realtime; maybe as slow as a forum at times, but with different expectations (namely being closer to real-time.) Personally, that’s most of the Discords I’m in.

> The channel already serves as the demarcation of topic.

Channels are a broad demarcation. Example from my experience, a #general-development-help channel in a Discord about using mods for a game, developing them, and chatting with mod developers. Threads then become useful for a person asking a particular question to whoever’s online and anyone interested gets to discuss it in an openly accessible but politely/quietly aside fashion.

> This isn't clutter, it's literally the point of the tool.

It does serve the useful job of “hey everybody, this message is a direct reply to this other message, not necessarily the one(s) right above me!” In smaller groups this is cool and good, and I like the replies as they are. In larger scale chats where there may be multiple discussions simultaneously within a channel (and they can’t reasonably make enough channels to break them all up), I think threads help contain the discussions.

> What you're describing is a forum, a totally different modality.

There are a lot of Discords that do function like faster-paced forums. It has grown beyond a real-time text/audio/video chat app for a small groups of people.

Re: Discord Launches Threads

#190

Post by tdeck »

kowbell wrote: post #152
tdeck wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I want to contribute to a prior discussion that happened a few minutes ago but another one is taking place now, then we have two separate conversations in the same linear chat stream. This is also a feature that discourages a bunch of side conversations. If I've participated in conversations on 5 different topics that have moved on, it can sometimes be tiring to have those old threads reopened with more discussi…

> If I've participated in conversations on 5 different topics that have moved on, it can sometimes be tiring to have those old threads reopened with more discussions. I reckon that’s more due to reopening old conversations regardless of whether it’s threaded or not. In fact, I feel threads make it easier to return to those conversations again: your message is there in that side-chats history and not in some global hi…

> I reckon that’s more due to reopening old conversations regardless of whether it’s threaded or not. In fact, I feel threads make it easier to return to those conversations again

I think we both agree there. My hypothesis (with no supporting data) is that the threaded format makes it easier to reopen old conversations, which makes it more likely that people will do so. In the vocal conversation analogy, the difficulty of having multiple vocal conversations at once naturally prevents people from starting more. Depending on the context that might be desirable or undesirable in a chat app.

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