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Threaded messaging comes to Slack

slackhq.com

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Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#31

Post by arjie »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #5

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. Conside…

FlowDock's threading is vastly superior, in my opinion. Everyone can see progress along threads, and conversations can stay separate.

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#32

Post by lima »

tabbott wrote: post #13
bluetidepro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seemed pretty genuine, until you had the 3 paragraph plug for your Zulip product that competes with Slack.

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 a…

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

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#33

Post by allover »

VA3FXP wrote: post #26

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.

Despise/tolerate/mess? The basic offering is a simple chat client with 'channels' and an easy signup/invite flow afaict.

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#34

Post by lima »

jc4p wrote: post #16
tabbott wrote: post #4

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…

I agree wth this comment a lot. I work at Stack Overflow, where our company chat is split between Slack and an internal chat product we made ourselves years ago. I think the "comments as threads" concept helps solve some specific use cases (like room clutter) but not the use cases I personally care about the most. The "in-line method" mentioned in this other article about the change is my preferred method: https://ww…

> I want better chat tools centered around making our async communication flow better.

Try Zulip, actually. We use it and it does that exact thing very well.

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#35

Post by lima »

bjterry wrote: post #21
bluetidepro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seemed pretty genuine, until you had the 3 paragraph plug for your Zulip product that competes with Slack.

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.

It's 100% open source.

Zulip used to be a company until they got bought by Dropbox (who were after the team, not the product).

Dropbox decided to open source Zulip and tabbott invested and continues to invest lots of (what I assume to be his free) time to make it happen.

The community around Zulip is extremely active and there's lots of high-quality development happening.

https://github.com/zulip/zulip

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#37

Post by Eridrus »

tabbott wrote: post #4

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…

Have you tried Flowdock? You've described pretty much their exact approach to threading, which I think is the right one.

The biggest downside I've found is some people always forget to use the threading feature and comments fall out of the thread.

[EDIT]: I just had a look at Slack's implementation and I think it has some pretty cool ideas. I think being able to follow an individual thread at a high level is useful. Being able to have a conversation without bothering the whole channel is useful. I think the idea that threads are private by default is not; I think a good alternative would be to disable notifications for messages in threads you don't care about, but have them remain public.

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#38

Post by tdburn »

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

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#39

Post by bigiain »

tabbott wrote: post #4

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…

Say, that's an interesting new wheel you're inventing there! ;-)

https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

(And I doubt jwz was the first smart guy to devote time to that particular problem too...)

Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack

#40

Post by lowglow »

bigiain wrote: post #39
tabbott wrote: post #4

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…

Say, that's an interesting new wheel you're inventing there! ;-) https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html (And I doubt jwz was the first smart guy to devote time to that particular problem too...)

His redirect is hilarious.
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