Item — HN Reader

My “mixed reviews” probably have more to do with slack being scatterbrained from a product direction. Look how poorly threading works nearly all of the time, with half of the conversation buried in a thread, the other half leaking out. Another example is how social link previews push the entire conversation up.

I love a lot of the tech work being done at Slack, but a lot of the product doesn’t feel particularly thoughtful.

1 comments

I never really found threading very useful in a live group chat. Most people would either mention the nick of the person they were responding to, or they would quote part of the text they were responding to and append their response. That's actually a lot easier to follow compared to having to click on a link and have it open in another window panel.

Though I do find it interesting that there are those who want threading in a group chat setting, yet they aren't interested in threaded discussions via email or usenet. Modern email clients/platforms actually use a limited threading model that's known as conversation view (where you only have a single thread of messages rather than a tree view like one sees on this website or reddit).

I agree on quoting. I think my problem is slacks product design isn’t very opinionated. There are many ways of calling back to an earlier conversation, but slack users don’t really have guidance on what they should do. So conversations past a few interactions get hard to connect together, continue, and discover.

Flowdock does a pretty good job of threaded communication. But Flowdock is pretty feature sparse and barely functioning mobile experience.