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Comment by janvdberg | Hacker News Reader

If you really want to improve IRC, add threads. Most IRC channels I join it’s impossible to follow discussions.

For me it's the inverse, I am having a real hard time with threads on slack. But no issue following discussions on busy IRC channels. It's probably just a matter of getting used to it one way or the other.

Slack's implementation of threads is really weird, it almost feels like they're trying to hide them. If I get replied to in a thread I almost certainly lose it.

On the other hand, Discord's UI treats threads as temporary channels, and that works way better because you can actually see the thread as unread or not in the channel and server lists. I really wish Slack would steal this.

I haven't used Discord too much, but my main gripe (apart from calling communities "servers") was that most communities had way too many channels already, but haven't seen them in action, so maybe that strategy works better in practice.

YMMV, I've been checking out discord and I don't really like threads much. It feels like the discussion is stashed away semi-hidden in a corner which sort of discourages casual / intermittent participation and you easily miss the whole thread. It's like I have to go out of my way and butt into someone's discussion whereas the chatter on an IRC channel feels open to every participant.

threading is a slack-ism, I prefer one linear scrollback instead of having to click into conversations

There is a draft specification to allow threading messages: https://ircv3.net/specs/client-tags/reply Not many clients are interested in implementing it, though.

but not slack threads, but reddit/mailing threads, or trees

But then why not use a mailing list?

Because of how email currently is.

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