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Comment by Quiark | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Threads in MS Teams utterly don't get used, they require significant self discipline to use properly (and yet they get more love from the devs than chat, somebody at MS is misguided in how the thing actually gets used).

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I've had the opposite experience with Teams threads. I'm at a big company where about half the posts are made by non-technical people, and yet the threads seem to get used pretty well. For all the things I hate about Teams, they seem to have hit a sweet spot in that bit of UI where it's hard (but not impossible) to accidentally add to an existing thread with a new topic, or accidentally make a new thread when you were trying to reply to a post, and because of that things stay pretty organized.

By "threads" in MS teams, do you mean what they call a "conversation" in a normal channel? How do they not get used - people just 'start a new conversation' for every reply?

We get basically perfect usage of the conversation system at work (an engineering org), and so I've always thought that the MS implementation was the best. It has almost all of the organisation positives of Zulip threading without forcing you to name every single thread, and with none of the onboarding pain. We also have 'New Conversation' as a button as suggested by a sibling comment, so maybe that's the key.

I find it interesting that we both had fairly self-centred views on how much the conversation system was used. Don't forget that MS have the actual data!

IME using teams about a year ago- I hated threads. The "reply" section took up a massive amount of space on the screen for each message and replying to a message took it out of the chronology of the channel/team. It's possible that if everyone were disciplined enough to make sure that every chat message was a "topic" and kept everything as replies, maybe that would work. But in practice, that's not how conversations work and some of that is subjective. I'd much rather have everything in chronological order so that I can decide what is relevant context. Also, there was no way to turn it off as an admin at the time (there may be now), so even if we said "never use replies", people still sometimes did.

Discord's reply function is basically exactly what I want- It takes up no extra space, the message being replied to is not removed from its original context, and the reply shows a preview and lets you easily jump back to the original context.

All it takes is disabling the bottom new thread creation box and replacing it with a button. That's what work did and it's so easily enforced on the creation of new threads.

Is this not just something MS Teams did? [1] You seem to be implying it's an optional setting or customization. I'm not an MS Teams admin, just a user on one instance of Teams, and was happy when the button appeared.

It stopped the broken conversations, but it didn't make anyone use MS Teams any more than necessary. (Our group has been using Slack for longer than Teams has been around, and since Teams is still inferior in nearly every way we haven't switched; due to the near silence from every other org in the company, they're probably doing the same).

[1] https://stitchdx.com/blog/microsoft-teams-new-conversation-b...

Interesting. I was assuming it was an admin who did it at my place of work.

We moved to teams from zooms ephemeral chats, and I have to say it's nicer in teams with all of the integrations and file storage.

I see some people initially fail to use threads in Teams, but with appropriate peer pressure that doesn't last for long.

I've been using teams for almost a year and didn't know it had threads

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