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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

The ideal thread implementation is in Flowdock (which not many people have heard of or use), but it's really the best of both worlds. Everything is a single stream of messages, and you can optionally group things as threads. There is a really nice blending of the two. Here's their implementation and you can see how well this works in practice. http://blog.flowdock.com/2017/08/31/the-1-customer-request-h...

Far far better than other abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.

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> abominations like slack - which hides streams of conversation behind a wall, making the UX terrible.

I'm not usually a defender of Slack but this is one of the things I _like_ about Slack threads. Typically in our rooms every discussion is a thread and if I'm not concerned with that particular discussion there's only ever one message and notification I need to dismiss. If I _am_ concerned with it I can opt in to reply notifications with two clicks.

Same here, if you don't hide the thread then what's the point? Some technical discussions in our team board last for hundred of messages, without threads it would be really hard to follow the channel, especially with multiple discussions going at the same time.

If you've used Flowdock, the point is that you can focus by going into the thread, by but you can also just view all the messages as they come in so that you're not missing anything on a channel.

People also learn to use threads quite fast. You can rethread comments if they don't have a reply yet (they are not in any thread yet).

I like how Slack hides threads. But I do have a few complaints.

I don't like that you can't come back later, select a bunch of messages or threads and say "Group into a thread" to clean up people not using threads.

Also I kind of hate when it's a week later and someone responds to a thread and you get pinged, but can't find where you got pinged from without clicking the dynamic group to see all thread activity.

Also, it really annoys me that threads open on the right with the text entry on the lower right when toast notifications on Windows pop up on the lower right, too. Great, now whenever someone replies I get a toast popup blocking me from seeing what I'm typing. Thanks, guys. Sure, that only happens on one monitor, but that's also the same monitor that I want my toast notifications and my Slack to be on because it's where I'm often looking.

I wish Slack had a notion of Threadmaster(s) on a channel who could drag other people's messages into and out of threads. Because with people who aren't familiar with Slack or aren't committed to threading, you end up with a split brain between the conversation in the thread and the conversation at the top level. I get that it's hard from a permissioning perspective since anyone can create a public channel, but this should be a solvable problem.

I also think it's problematic (and, granted this might be more on users than slack) - that a thread off an @here comment pings everyone in existence on every reply. Maybe I just wish our admins would turn off @here for general usage though ;P

They fixed your second problem with the thread tab, which shows all threads you are part of. I find that pretty convenient since it sorts threads by the latest message added, not sorted chronologically by the first message like it is in the normal view.

Yes, this is exactly what threads are for. To get a side conversation out of the way.

I'm sure this is an atypical use case, but I found the hidden threads really useful for creating spoiler threads about TV shows/movies/etc. All discussion about the topic can stay inside the thread, and folks who want to avoid spoilers can simply avoid clicking on the thread.

Isn't that what Discord's spoiler tags are for?

It's discouraged on some Slack servers though, because it's pretty terrible for accessibility.

I'm not familiar with the accessibility, but this seems more like Slack needing to make the feature more accessible than saying that the feature is bad.

Indeed! So good to find someone else who had this experience. We went from Flowdock => Slack on a fully distributed team of ~20 engineers, total staff size of ~40. Flowdock threading was night-and-day so much better than Slack threading. It was such a stark difference, everyone noticed. What's so maddening about this is that I'll bring it up to anyone who will listen, and they'll think I'm just nostalgic, or a curmudgeon against all new things. But no, Flowdock simply did threads better. And you had to use both, for awhile, on real teams, to "feel" the difference. (Screenshots can't really convey it.) If you were on a scaled team using Flowdock before adopting Slack, it would have been totally obvious to you.

Tweeted about this here:

https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/1263317861537402885

Nice to meet a fellow traveller!

And yes, to the point of someone else on this HN thread, the closest thing to Flowdock threads on the market today in a semi-popular chat product is Zulip "Topics", as described here: https://zulip.com/help/about-streams-and-topics -- the difference is that Zulip forces threads to be labeled (similar to an email subject: line) whereas in Flowdock, all threads were anonymous, given a thread-id (permalink) automatically, and also automatically color-coded.

So I decided to do a search on Flowdock, turns out it is very old. And they have been down for two days [1] last year. Their last blog post are from 2018.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945633

Flowdock was and still is a great product. Sadly, it was acquired way back in 2013 by Rally Technologies, which in turn was acquired by CA, which in turn by Broadcom. I think a majority of the original authors exit'ed at some point, and the product has seen rather little feature development ever since.

Lack of competent engineers in the product might also explain the extended downtimes last year. One of them apparently included a full-fledged database corruption where all conversations for a day or so were permanently lost.

I know at least one organization that is so deeply ingrained and accustomed to Flowdock that they haven't even considered migrating to Slack. I, too, still think that Flowdock is a superior product to Slack for the core chat feature. Adding simple video-conferencing would pretty much bring it up to speed with the modern day.

Zulip approximately does this too, right?

It does. Zulip calls what Discord and Slack refer to as "channels", "streams", and what Discord calls "threads", "topics".

Zulip's superior topic UX was why I went with it over Slack & Discord. Now Discord has feature-parity there and even more with 'private' topics/threads. I have to create a separate channel/stream if I want some topics to be private.

So now, since my users love Discord so much, I'm going to be fending off requests to move over to Discord, where the conversation data is locked in and cannot be self-hosted or exported.

Good for Discord, but I admit I'm not looking forward to said conversations.

Personally, I'm waiting for Matrix to implement Zulip-like threads (and a client that looks like Quassel).

Does the matrix protocol require modifications to get zulip-like threads?

Yup, I believe this is the latest proposal: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2836

Agreed. Slack threads are unbearable.

I guess I would have to use Flowdock to understand -- those gifs were confusing and unclear to me. I'm not sure what I was looking at.

Personally I find slack threads perfectly usable and helpful for keeping things organized for the most part. What's the issue with them? I found them a revolutionary step forward in chat UX to be honest, something that had been missing for 20 years or more.

Some people - like myself - prefer to see all the messages go past and mentally thread them. It’s a skill I learnt from many years of irc use. Others prefer to click through and not think about thread content until they choose to.

Also I’d rather not grab my mouse to see things.

> Also I’d rather not grab my mouse to see things.

I have not tried threads yet but I have been assured they are fully accessible via the keyboard only.

They emphatically are not.

In what way? I'd like to tell them about it; they've explicitly asked for feedback on this.

Oh, sorry; I thought you were talking about Slack threads. I can't speak to Discord threads.

Ah my bad!

> Also I’d rather not grab my mouse to see things.

Use the up and down arrows to navigate to the message you want and hit T to switch to the thread side view. Similarly, you can do the same to find your own messages and use E to edit them.

Why not just try to unlearn that, because it is a massive waste of mental effort in a lot of situations?

One thing that I don’t like is that I have to click a checkbox every time I want to submit a reply to a thread to the channel that the thread is in. Not everyone in the channel is notified in the same way when additional replies are made within a thread within the channel.

Which, indeed, is the point. Threads are primarily useful in very busy channels with multiple conversations happening. The point of a thread is to get the conversation out of the main channel so it doesn't disrupt other discussions. If you want every message to go to the main channel, just post it there, not in a thread. IMHO that checkbox shouldn't even exist.

My experience is from ~2 years ago so things may have changed a bit.

Essentially there is a default view which contains all messages as usual. Each message also has a symbol next to it. If it's grey message bubble, it's a message that is not tied to any thread (it can be replied to to start a new thread. Previously if no other messages have appeared on channel so far, it can be dragged & dropped to another thread). If it's colored message bubble, it's the first message in the thread. A colored arrow means it's part of the thread with that color.

This allows you to mostly just stay in default view with all of the channel's messages. As long as people are putting the messages in the thread itself, you could quickly use the colors to see which thread the message is on (color collisions did happen, but they were fairly rare). You would need to open the thread only if you needed more context or wanted to reply to it, though replying can also be done by writing to channel & dragging the message to thread.

Tell me how to (a) identify an interesting thread, (b) view its contents, (c) contribute to it, and (d) return to it after closing the app, without using the mouse.

Hi!

I'm not sure if this is appropriate, but getting conversation representation and message sorting right is the largest focus of my passion project, Ametha.

It would be amazing if I could have a 15 minute voice call with you to hear about your experiences with online communication & collaboration?

The offer is obviously open to anyone else here as well, but no pressure at all, and apologies if HN is not the right avenue for this.

Edit: Feel free to use the email in my profile

Another really good implementation is Quill (quill.chat). It has a "room type" option where a room is either threaded or free for all. In a threaded room it's a little more message-board like, every top-level post has a topic and such, so it starts a thread. In a free-for-all room it's basically the same as Slack.

Signed in just to say YES! You get it. Flowdock is by far the best thread implementation ever.

Being a heavy whatsapp user (Brazilian) I use Slack's forward function, inside the same conversation window (group or DM) as a "reference keeper" to what message I'm replying to, pretty much like whatsapp's "reply" feature.

I understand the "also send as direct message/to group" mimics this. This, for me, is a good thread implementation for a chat tool.

I actually feel that MS Teams is the best thread implementation (I haven't used Flowdock, but I have used Zulip). The app performance is a little slow which makes it feel slightly clunkier to use, but the UX for a normal Team channels makes everything be in a thread by default, and makes it completely intuitive.

I think you're underselling just how much slower and clunkier Teams is. It genuinely overshadows every supposed UX improvement for me, and it's nigh unusable on Linux / Firefox.

I hated when Slack brought them in, but slowly realised they're really useful when used appropriately & the responsibility is less on Slack itself & more on people using the feature appropriately; threads in 1:1 PMs are just utterly stupid though.

I’m not so sure I like people “rewriting” history. Edits past a certain time also break comment chains (which is why people call out their edit). Moving posts in and out of threads would make it very hard to find things, as well break timelines for troubleshooting.

+1 Flowdock - was using it back in 2014 and it had the best threading experience of all apps!

Hmmm, I wonder how Flowdock's threading implementation compared with Zulip's?

The Rust developers largely use Zulip as an IRC replacement, and I find its UI to be excellent for my use cases: keeping up with advances to conversations that happened while I wasn't present, fully ignoring conversations that I'm not interested in, and focusing on individual conversations that are happening in parallel. An extremely good experience for such a thoroughly-distributed operation. The only downside is the slight friction for extremely minor conversation; it's good to have side channels just for idle, non-topical chitchat, which isn't a great fit for the Zulip UI.

But you cannot get notified about a specific Zulip topic, can you? *That* blocks me to try to switch to it.

There is a view called "recent topics" for that. E.g. https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#recent_topics

Flowdock is really good. You rarely need to use the mouse. If only the search was a bit better and there are some occasional crashes.

But the core design with threads is a killer feature and prevents migration to anything else.

Well, Discord is much more of an abomination due to its hostility towards user privacy and freedom. Slack has the excuse to appease bosses too. Discord takes data from children.

Newsgroups had fine threads. Same for email, before Google basically killed threads.

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