GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023

This is like being acquired by IBM and being forced to use Lotus Notes and Sametime. You must eat your own dogfood..

> like the threaded messaging, kind of a mess, maybe we just don't do it right

I haven't found any chat style application that does threaded messaging "right" with how I think it should work (I want real time USNET with thread level ACLs).

That said, they're all ok IF (and that's a big if) everyone working with the accepts the "this is how they work" and use it as such with the appropriate level of technical literacy (and that's a big part of the big if).

Slack is ok. Its one deep and for active channels it can solve the "get a thread you two" so that a conversation doesn't spill over into the main channel. However, that hurts discoverability of messages... and for less active channels is likely overkill.

Zulip's is better than Slack with its topics... but is way overkill for a bunch of friends.

Teams has two styles with the team "here's a post, followups go on that" and "here's a group chat" which has no threading at all and tend to have new group chats forked for each new topic.

Discord has threads which allow for the slack style "get a thread" and a bit more ACL on the thread (different permissioning model for the base application).

All that said, I believe that the real thing that is lacking isn't threaded conversations but a strong chained reply-to feature. The best example of this I can find is Stack Overflow chat. For example, https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/55971002#5... which is a reply (you can see that arrow thing) that you can click on and then follow to the message that it was a reply of, which itself is a reply to another comment.

And so, for me, it's not the thread that is important as that is discoverable - but rather the "what is this replying to?" along with the ability to fork a new room/channel that handles a given topic (because everything in one room is a complete mess).

Returning back to teams... it's ok. It serves the simplest interface acceptably. Every chat app would work better if everyone used it to its fullest... but as long as there's someone who doesn't use it "right" I'm going to suggest that Teams or Discord are probably the easiest to not use wrong (or set up to limit the 'how it can be used wrong is difficult').

It's a "productivity tool" that actively wastes my time. If it _just_ did messaging and conferencing and had reasonable tools and _configuration_ around those options, I might not mind.. it's all the other useless cruft they insist on forcing into the product that never really works properly.

Notifications. Someone put a thumbs up on my message. I get notified twice. Once in the cat and once in "Activity." You can hide "Activity" but that doesn't stop the notification. You can't configure this.

One day teams decided that the window with the view of myself should be mirrored. There's no option to change this. If you're using your camera to show documents or other items, this is an absolute nightmare.

The background video filters work once. If you join a second meeting, they never work again until you restart the browser. You can text chat but you can't video chat with yourself, so there's no good way to test your camera setup until you're going live.

For several months my calendar lost the time column on the left side. I had to open each meeting to see what time it was actually set for. That randomly came back in December.

Twice I've been trying to present something on a call when a dumb "hey check out this new feature" dialog popped up right into the middle of what I was doing. Once it captured the click, and then promptly crashed when it tried to open whatever thing it was hyping. Even if you're just chatting, the pop ups steal focus and interrupt what you are doing.

Once a day teams will start using all the CPU and will stop showing chats or notifications. I have to actively watch the CPU on that machine to see if this is happening and I need a restart. Most often I find out when I get an email that shows me an unread teams message or someone asks why I didn't answer their call.

The UI is garbage and there are zero keyboard shortcuts. It constantly asks me if I want to "replace the attachment" simply because I once uploaded a file with the same name to an entirely different chat.

You can't forward a chat. You literally just have to copy and paste it to a different user. If you join them to an existing personal chat, it just creates a new specific chat for whatever ad hoc group you tried to create.

The whole thing is a poorly thought out also ran set of extensions designed to stave off competition and it's all built on ancient Microsoft Exchange technology. I sincerely hate it.

[dead]

I wonder if MS is aiming to use the conversations about software that employees are having in Teams meetings as training data for AI. To automate them away.