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:
Threaded messaging comes to Slack
41–50 of 96 posts
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#42Is 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…
Another thing I completely forgot about: no mention of keyboard shortcuts for threads...
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#43I'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.…
Yep, I have. It's pretty different from Zulip.
Zulip's threading model is much more like a lightweight version of email threading -- when you start a new thread, you pick a short topic for it, and then after that people just reply to the thread.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#44This 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.
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.
Can you elaborate on what you find lacking/problematic in the Electron app? I find very little difference between it and any other proper desktop app. I'm on a 2013 MacBook Pro and I find it works very well.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#45This 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.
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.
That hit me pretty acutely today when upgrading. Restarting slack took 15 seconds and pegged all 4 (8 logical!) cores. Why should a chat app ever do that?
I get that a billion dollars doesn't buy what it used to, but it really ought to buy native apps on at least all the major platforms.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#46This 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.
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.
I also wish it had a native application. For my previous job I had to work on an 8GB Mac. Using Slack with 8 or so teams ate just short of 2GB. The solution was to start opening 1 or 2 teams in the browser at a time. One of the nice things about chat is being able to rapidly and immediately communicate, not being able to have my teams open all the time defeated that. I ended up running a ZNC server on AWS for persistent IRC connections to the Slack channels. This allowed me to have 8 teams open and be connected to a dozen IRC channels for under 2MB of RAM.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you elaborate on what you find lacking/problematic in the Electron app? I find very little difference between it and any other proper desktop app. I'm on a 2013 MacBook Pro and I find it works very well.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I don't love this: http://imgur.com/a/P4TTE
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#48Is 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…
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.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#49Is 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…
Given that none of those things are important to me, and that threaded messaging is important to me, I suspect we have very different answers to that question.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#50So 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.
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.