Yet still no speed improvements, after all these years.
Threaded messaging comes to Slack
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#82I'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…
Your comment seemed pretty genuine, until you had the 3 paragraph plug for your Zulip product that competes with Slack.
Isn't TFA an actual marketing post from Slack for their new feature?
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
FWIW, administrators can turn off Email Display, but it's per-team, not per-member.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#84This 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 completely gave up on Slack's desktop app and just use a browser. On the Mac, wrapping three teams in a Fluid custom browser saves me nearly a gigabyte of RAM...
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#85I'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.…
That's why we initially preferred Flowdock over Slack (but I think now we have a clear winner, and I use mostly Slack)
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#86I'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…
Slack's approach could be very good and the "7 or 8 percent" figure is not necessarily a bad thing. That figure could mean that most of the time, regular Slack channels work well for them. This feature helps address the 7-8% of the time where it's worth splitting off a thread.
Contrast that with a tool like Zulip where every message requires a topic, and you have a much more structured paradigm. Percentages mean nothing because it's simply mandatory. That forces more organization, but perhaps part of the appeal of Slack is that it doesn't have to be so organized. You just engage with your team, and the only structure you have to think about ahead of time is which channel to use.
So I can see the case for "spot-threading" like Slack is rolling out, while keeping the core organizational structure very simple.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#87It's a welcome addition. I work remotely and virtually all our correspondence goes through slack, it's quite easy to lose important information and the search isn't that great.
However the problem is if you use Slack for anything other than transient information then you increase the problem with information sitting in silos, already we've got transient information in slack, information in the project management software, information in the kanban type software, information in issues on github, etc. You add Slack into the mix and it really gets hard to remember what is where.
A service to pull together all the information is probably the next killer product.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#88I 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…
Never heard of Flowdock but it sounds very compelling. We're currently looking to get our enterprise on Slack and the costs seem .. unreasonable, and I feel that's because Slack is the top player in the game and can ask for such pricing. Hmm.
Don't choose Flowdock. It was an amazing tool, but since they were acquired, development has completely halted and it's unfortunately stagnating.
I still think it beats Slack in many ways, but it doesn't appear to have much of a future.
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#89I'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…
>The "in-line method" mentioned in this [FastCompany] article about the change is my preferred method:
My gripe doesn't stem from rooms being too cluttered, it stems from if there are 4 people talking at once and I'm in two different conversations chains with them, I'd like to explicitly reply to a specific message and carry on the convo. not hide it in a comment thread.
It's fascinating that the preferences for "flat view vs thread view" get revisited in newer software. Fyi, Jeff Atwood blogged about this 10 years ago in 2006.[1]
Thank you for linking that FastCompany article because it emphasizes that Slack's distinguishing rationale was to visually place threads in a different area of the screen. Whether that proves to be the best tradeoff between flat-vs-thread remains to be seen in the marketplace of ideas.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/
Re: Threaded messaging comes to Slack
#90Is 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 n…
Not sure if it's just me but Slack's notifications just aren't good enough. I want something stickier like pretty much every other native IM client that existed before Slack